Gold Fame Citrus

BOOK THREE

Rage fueled Ray through his first day of flight, tuna cans tinking in the starlet’s buttery satchel. Luz had all these rooms inside her — library, well-stocked pantry, smoky bordello, circus ring. All these wondrous rooms and yet she sat in the one that was blank, with nails poking from the plaster where portraits once hung. It had been his task to take her hand and walk her, each day, to a different room. Today the rumpus room, today the greenhouse, today the heated indoor swimming pool! Sometimes the journey took the entire day; sometimes they never got there. Sometimes he deposited her on the velvet ottoman in the solarium, certain beyond all doubt that this time she would stay. But she was never where he left her. Without him she would return to the bare plaster walls, or, worse, wander off to the root cellar, the spidery shed, the asylum. The inevitable symmetry: all those rooms had once thrilled him, especially those, but now he was done exploring.

He marched onward, keeping the dune at his back, but feeling the need to keep turning to look at it, lest it creep up on him like the ghosts in a retro video game he’d binged on as a boy. The starlet’s scarf did its best to keep him breathing. The satchel’s lining was soft — satin, or silk even — and he stroked a hole in one pocket just to feel something besides sand dragging across his skin. Occasionally the sun stopped in the sky. That was worrisome.

He transferred the leather satchel from one shoulder to the other, his embarrassment at sporting it the first sign his rage was waning.

I’ll be right back, tinked the tuna. I’ll be right back, whistled the wind across the lip of his open jug.

“I always wanted to come back,” Ray said aloud, to see if it was true. “I walked so far I thought I’d make a circle and come back to you.”

Later, stabbing at the can of tuna with the bottle opener tool on his Leatherman, working a lip open with its wire cutters, “There was a largeness on top of me, there always was. You lifted it, Luz, but also brought it right back down. Then Ig. Lifted, then right back down. I never wanted to leave her, or you. But it felt good to do it.”

I’ll be right back. He knew it was a lie — he had never, in all his life, been right back. But what he could not discern was how far the lie extended. Did he intend to come back at all? Yes, surely. But the more he walked, the better he felt, every step if not a good decision then at least his own, so that by the time the sulfur pools disappeared behind him the scarf had lifted closer to his eyes, which must have meant he was smiling.

It would not be so bad to die, went a story he’d told before. No, he would not be returning to that overseas desert in his mind. Instead, he stayed stateside, recalled the hollow solitary yuccas, papier-mâché and dry filament, and the time he and Lonnie broke into a sound stage in Culver City and sledgehammered the foamcore streets of New York, a city neither of them had visited nor ever cared to. He missed Lonnie. He missed the courtyard compound and the first bed he and Luz had shared. How brave she’d been then, leaving her evac ship in the sand, looking right at him as they fucked. He missed Luz then, horribly, and almost turned around. But there was the gully they’d forded, the bone-dry threshold whispering, Onward.

Everything was a little better in retreat. From the other side of the gully it seemed possible to walk to the highway, to walk back to Santa Monica, to walk up to Point Dume and drop his satchel in the sand and tap a skinny girl on her shoulder. Approached from the rear everything was mirror image, the bad omens good ones, the impossible possible, the situation improving rather than going straight to shit. The nasty-smelling peppermints went back into their wrappers. Fingers of water stretched back into aqueducts. Lies were truths. Luz got back into his bed and never got out.

Sometimes optimism joined him on his walk. He would find someone, or someone him. Red Cross had to come through here. Evac lorries. Ration shipments. Water trucks. Even better, they would find Luz and Ig without him and send them somewhere moist, the mossy inlet Luz talked about, the marshes and the pines. He would find them there, on a blanket in a meadow slurping smiles of watermelon.

Sometimes gloom stepped in stride beside him. At his back the dune sea was Fort Leavenworth, growing, gaining on him. At some point he noticed he was marching. He’d always been good at that. But then the drills had made it seem so easy. Forward march. About-face. Forward march. As if going back was a kind of going forward, as open and free and boundless, all clear skies and plains. But going back was complicated. Maybe impossible. For one, there was the question of go back where? He might march back to Point Dume or San Diego, could continue to the starlet’s, to Lonnie’s, to the breakers or the brig. A sea sound took up in his ears and became cicadas dripping from the trees, the carapaces he was forbidden to touch but did.

To look back was to join hands with ghosts, to build himself a house of past frailties and failures and all the unending ways in which he was a disappointment. Ray’s house of the past had a matching mailbox out front, and its white lettering read HOLLIS, GREENCASTLE, INDIANA. Here was the corn and here was the creek, here were tornados of gnats funneling over a baseball field. In the neighborhood where he grew up there were barbecues with half-used tins of lighter fluid beside them, folding plastic lawn furniture in every backyard except his. Here was citronella and cut grass and thunderstorms like plush black curtains falling closed overhead. Here were the train tracks and here were the blackberries he was to rinse before eating but didn’t. Here were tire forts and bottle rockets and the childproofing strip busted off a lighter. Here was the Leatherman, found in the otherwise empty drawer of a workbench, surely his father’s. Here were peeled, sharpened sticks and the back of a bus seat slashed and an adult who kept saying vandal though he was not a vandal — he was a good boy, class monitor.

But here was the Leatherman and here was the seat and hadn’t he slashed it? If he was not a vandal then what of that? There were the girls in his class, sharpening Crayola crayons and, later, examining the tips of their hair. Here was the old quarry filled for swimming, the surface of the water rainbowed with suntan oil, here was the floating platform from which he dove deep enough to scare himself, deep enough for the green, sun-warmed water to turn black and arctic. Here was the metal siding and the cloth awnings and the sprinklers and the wide scratchy sidewalk and here was the family room with the piano he’d never seen anyone play. Here, the way other houses had boxes of tissues or Bibles in every room, were boxes of rubber gloves, blue for cleaning, purple for Lucy.

Poor Lucy, his mother never let him say. In Lucy’s room his sister lolled on rubber sheets, a puddle of a person, a body without a brain, and beside her a pylon of monitors where a nightstand might have been. Here were the cleaners who came in on Mondays and Thursdays, a young husband and wife, and here were the pennies his mother had hidden in the corners — behind the dresser, balanced atop the baseboards — to test them, now in a shiny stack on the kitchen island. And here in the window was the prism, a teardrop of glass hanging from fishing line, spraying rainbows across the linoleum floor in the late afternoon. Once, when his aunt was visiting, she and his mother played old music and drank chardonnay in the sitting room and his mother said, What I’m most afraid of is that she can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality and she’ll have a nightmare and think it was me doing it to her. His sister Lucy stopped breathing every Wednesday night, when Ray went to Scouts and his mother taught him all the ways to say Come home.

—

Fear fueled him through the second day, fear doubled by strange sounds he’d heard in the night and by drinking down close to the last of his water. He spent the second night where he stopped, and he stopped when a massive sinkhole came into view and he hadn’t the will to circumnavigate it. He used the satchel as a pillow, untied the scarf from his neck and wrapped it around his eyes to block the audacious moonlight emanating from the dune sea. With his eyes closed he still rocked from side to side, phantom footsteps, and little lightnings of lactic acid fired in his spent legs. He tried to sleep, one hand in his pocket, curled around the Leatherman.

For some time, Ray did not know who was older, him or Lucy. He did not remember a time without Lucy, and so he assumed she’d been there when he arrived, assumed himself the baby and the repair. Lucy’s birthdays had no cake and so no wax number atop to correct him, no balloons or streamers, as these were contaminants. It was only when Aunt Breanna was visiting for his father’s wake — Ray would have been seven then — that his mother had caught a glimpse of him peeking in on them, summoned him to her, hugged him, her breath boozy, and said, “At least you had us to yourself for a while, sweet boy.”

According to Lonnie, this explained a lot: because of his sister’s disability and then his father’s death, the household instilled no sense of hierarchy via birth order, meaning that Ray’s environment had failed to indoctrinate him in the ways of subjugation, making him essentially impervious to hegemony. He had no impulse to dominate, nor had he developed a tolerance for domination. Lonnie had gone to an all-boys boarding school in New Hampshire, where he became an expert in hegemony and domination. Plus, he’d read his stepmother’s books about birth order and sun signs. According to Lonnie, the lack of a sense of birth order and his father’s early death had made Ray’s childhood a distinctly mortal one — the bubble of immortality that insulates most toddlers popped before it could incubate Ray’s ego for very long. All this in Taurus ascending made Ray one of a very few capable of genuine altruism.

(Wow, Luz had said. That sounds so much better than martyr complex.)

Anyway, Ray was special, was Lonnie’s idea, which was nice because as a kid Ray had felt mostly ignored. Underfoot, his mother always said, urging him out the sliding glass door with her elbows, so as not to contaminate her purple-gloved hands. Ray did not remember his father, not even his dying, though he did have a cluster of inexplicably rich friends in his memories — they had docks on the river and TVs in their rooms and one had a go-cart with a track wriggling through the woods — friends he never saw again, so maybe he’d been stowed with their parents while his father deteriorated.

It wasn’t as if Ray’s mother refused to talk about his father. She answered anything Ray asked, but he hardly asked because it seemed there were important questions, right questions, some revelation that might be set free within him if only he could find the words. He couldn’t, and that was frustrating, and so he stopped trying. His mother told stories about his father, and so did her two sisters when they came to visit from the East Coast, but they were always the same stories: His father had once fished a grape out of Ray’s mouth that had been choking him. His father had built the deck out back but didn’t seal it right, so it was warpy. As a boy, his father broke his arm climbing onto a horse named Gidget. It was as if each of them, Ray’s mother and his two aunts, had been allotted a story or two about the man, six stories max. They asked whether Ray remembered the trip to Hocking Hills, or Turkey Run, or Nine Lakes. Sometimes he said he did; sometimes he told the truth.

He did remember that after his father died, his mother had given away all his father’s things. Someone came and took them, even the mattress where he’d died, and as a boy Ray could see why that had seemed like a good idea. But he wondered often now what he might have had of his father’s, if he had something besides the Leatherman.

A waterfall of too-wide ties cascading from a wire hanger.

A wooden cigar box with earplugs inside.

Dog tags.

Maybe the piano had been his father’s. Maybe his sheet music was still in the bench, a favorite tune tattered.

He wondered what kind of a man he might have become with those possessions.

It occurred to him, trying for sleep near this hole in the earth, that if he died out here Ig would have none of his things to hold on to. Ray wondered: would Ig wonder about him? And if she did, would she wonder about her father or the man who took her?

In his dreams he was still walking.

—

The wind woke him. He sat up and the night was dense with darkness, somehow. Maybe the moon had gone down? He flailed in the dark a moment, the wind wail getting louder, before shoving the scarf up from his eyes. The wail was behind him, somehow, and he turned to see dune light, all ablaze and bearing down on him. He sprang to his feet too fast, and his head went instantly aswirl. He blinked, and the light honed itself, a light within the dune light, then two. Headlights, then, and the wail not the wind but some bizarre engine he had never heard before.

“Here!” he called, making Xs with his arms overhead.

The headlights came right at him, and he shouted with joy. The vehicle bore down on him, not slowing. “Here!” he called again, afraid they would mow him down in the dark. More lights throbbed to life then, doubling the spotlight on him. Surely they saw him. Still, the truck came at him full speed, shrieking its banshee shriek. Ray waited, near-blind. He heard whoops, and the vehicle roared past him, so close he could smell its oil burning. It must have been a lorry or a jeep, because when it passed he could make out the silhouettes of roll bars, KC lights and massive tires.

In the distance, the vehicle slowed to an idle. Ray waited. Deep murmurs came to him across the desert, as though the ground was opening up beneath him. Then laughter. This was no rescue vehicle.

Ray groped for the Leatherman in his pocket and pulled it out, struggling to extract one of the small blades. He held the dinky tool in front of him, saw it quaking in the moonlight. He steadied himself and stooped to grab the satchel. Ray begged his eyes to adjust, trying to make out whether there was dry pan in front of him or the sinkhole’s chasm.

When the vehicle turned, so did Ray. He dropped the ridiculous pocketknife and ran. The whoops and cackles from the jeep suggested this decision was an entertaining one. He fled, or did the best approximation his ravaged legs could manage. The jeep roared at his heels, but did not overtake him. Ray pressed the ground away as best he could, lurching over the pan in front of him. The jeep hung back, then lunged up at him, then receded again. They were playing with him. Then, whoever they were roared up alongside him, the huge tires popping rocks up all around. Another whoop, the engine’s unreal screech, and something came down hard on his head.

—

Ray woke at dawn in the shadows of two men. His head was three times its normal size, or felt like it. He looked immediately to their truck, a Japanese hybrid deal somehow lower than when it had chased him, big regal decal on its door: BLM. No roll bars, no KC lights, lower and seemingly miniaturized. And why had they waited until sunup to collect him? Unless this was not the truck that had chased him.

The rangers gave him water, though he still had a little bit in his jug. One of them said, to no one in particular, “Most individuals who succumb to dehydration still have water on their person.”

“My girl and my child are two days’ walk back that way,” Ray said.

They only nodded. One ranger removed the blood-stained scarf from Ray’s head and handed it to him. “Got a gnarly gash here,” he said, unzipping a fanny pack and fishing out ointment and a bandage. The other searched the satchel. “Do you have a weapon in here or on your person?”

“No sir,” said Ray, and the ranger returned the satchel. He instructed Ray to get in the truck bed. Ray did. The truck had no roll bars or KC lights, but it did have a dozen heavy metal rings installed in its bed, six down one side, six down the other, for shackles, Ray realized. Also two huge barrels of fuel. The truck lurched to life; its engine sound was any other engine sound. These were not the people who had chased him.

The truck turned and sped away from the dune sea.

Ray pounded on the window. “Wrong way,” he shouted, pointing. “You’re going the wrong way!” He pounded harder on the window, gestured maniacally. “Go back!” he screamed. “Go back, go back, go back!” He tried to pry the window open, but it was sealed and reinforced with wire mesh. He shouted and shouted. The truck vaulted over the desert, unresponsive except to throw Ray to his ass.

He watched the plume of dust erupt behind the truck, an earthen miasma between him and Luz and Ig. His head felt humongous. Certainly it was filling with some nasty fluids. He reached up to touch his wound but found instead the bandage, plasticky and puffy. The sun was roasting his dome, but when he tried to wrap the scarf around his head, the wind took it and sent the silk snaking off into the sky.

A grim thought came to him then.

He glanced at the cabin and, seeing only the unmoving backsides of two crew cuts, reached into the satchel. He’d stowed his driver’s license in the pocket meant for the starlet’s cell phone, which he found empty now. The rangers must have taken it. So they knew who he was. If they did, it would be only so long before that game of institutional connect-the-dots drew a picture of a court-martial. The rings rattled in the bed. But why hadn’t they shackled him? Nothing made sense.

He searched the satchel again, groped in the cell phone pocket, discovering a rip in the deepest corner of its silky lining. With two fingers he mined the hole, probing desperately until he came up with what he wanted. Checking again whether the rangers watched him, he did what he should have done a long time ago. He rested his arm on the hot rim of the truck bed and with one effortless and almost imperceptible twitch flicked Raymond Xavier Hollis, 6ft. 2in. 150 lbs, hair: brn, eyes: blue, organ donor, 623 Windy Lawn Lane, Greencastle, Indiana into the truck’s billowing wake.

The truck hauled ass for a very long time. Ray guessed they were going northeast, though the dune sea seemed at times both behind and ahead of them so he could not be sure. The ground went from white to blush to rust and back again. The hills were sapped tan, then chalky green with veins of aqua, then they were lavender mountains with streaks of saffron and marigold, brown, brown and brown. Ray curled in the stingy shade of the barrels and nodded off, waking when the truck moaned into low gear. They were going up now, crawling high on the haunch of an alluvial fan. Canyon walls rose on either side of them, banded and dry, and the truck lurched steadily up the gully. Soon, it turned and climbed up and into a scooped-out space where the rocks were iron-colored and ore-stripped. The truck summited, then swayed down a sandy road. A padded quiet overtook them, accompanied by a low, smooth whirring. The plume of dust dissipated. It took Ray some minutes to realize that asphalt was beneath them.

He managed to stand again, and turn. Ahead was a bleak, nude mound crowned by crosses. At its foot, settled into the rock, was a colonial mirage: gleaming red Spanish tile roof, smooth pink adobe walls wrapped with wrought-iron balconies and studded with the nubs of roof beams, a bell tower capped by a quivering weathervane, its mustang bounding windward, everywhere archways. In the foreground was a gate of black metal and wood flanked by a medieval turret of pink stone. The truck paused at the turret’s narrow window, the driver said, “Medical,” and from behind a screen of chicken wire a hairy arm waved them through.

The truck circled around the castle. In its courtyard squatted a compound of blue-gray trailers. They passed these and descended along a wide, recessed causeway walled with Moorish tilework. What was once a moat, Ray realized. The truck stopped again at another gate, red rusted swords stabbed into the ground, cranked out now by some invisible mechanism to allow them into the castle fort.

Ray received medical attention in the cathedral ballroom where his was the only bed occupied. He spent his first several hours pleading for a search party, screaming after Luz and Ig, depicting in frantic detail the road, the path, the gully, the sulfur pools and the Melon. “Not our jurisdiction,” one of the guards said, though another said, “We’re on it, partner,” before he shackled Ray to his bed — a precaution, he said.

Ray spent most of the time thereafter on his back, counting the ballroom’s ornately scalloped rib beams overhead. From the twentieth hung a punched tin chandelier, retrofitted with sockets and flame-shaped bulbs. He continued to ask after his family, as he’d begun to call them, and the staff assured him it was being taken care of. The next day, they asked him if he could walk and when he said yes he was led down two spiral staircases — the first lustrous blond wood, the second stone. Gates of latticed iron clanked behind them, summoning high school Poe — crypts and catacombs. The stone walls slouched, tunnels narrowed then turned white, and it got, somehow, very very cool.

—

Before it became another venue of the evac clusterfuck, the place called Limbo Mine had offered talc for pulping the world’s paper, for fire-retarding her plastics, stiffening her ceramics, matting her house paint, drying the palms of her nervy athletes, powdering the clammy bottoms of her babies. The place called Limbo Mine was in fact not one mine but a daisy chain of smaller mines — Colfax Mine, Jericho, Buena Vista, Hazen Pit, Coyote Springs, Lone Pine Pit, Dot’s Ledge, Hole in the Ground, though no one knew these names anymore. The individual mines had been bored out, linked together in a three-hundred-mile maze and hastily retrofitted for security by the Army Corps of Engineers, who then ingeniously joined them to the labyrinth of tunnels beneath Clay Castle, William Randolph Hearst’s uncompleted winter villa hidden high on the clay preamble to the eastern Sierras, and transformed into Impermanent Retention Facility Nine, the place called Limbo Mine.

Their courses having been expertly schemed by prospectors long dead, the tunnels in Limbo Mine ached to give up their talc, so that the ground beneath the detainees’ feet was green-white and silky soft enough to gouge with a fingernail, puffs rising underfoot to bleach their bottom halves, giving each the appearance of an apparition disappearing. Overhead, ventilation shafts had been garlanded from crimped iron buttresses, and from the buttresses hung lanterns illuminated by industrial glow sticks, letting off a pale jade radiance. Despite the paper masks provided them, detainees and guards alike hacked up warm chartreuse phlegm balls.

It was here that Ray was deposited when he was well enough to walk, when he gave them a fake name and said he was trying to get to family in Wisconsin. They took him underground, via Poe stairs and bored-out tunnels and freight elevators and a tiny train, hundreds of green-glowing eyes above paper masks peering at him along the way. They deposited him finally in a cool-walled cell. Processing, they called it, a holding facility until they could locate his sponsors, which they never would because the aunt and uncle whose names he’d given did not exist in Milwaukee nor anywhere else.

Down in Limbo Mine, mostly Spanish softly echoed through the chalky caverns. Ray recalled one of Lonnie’s conspiracy theories: busloads of Mojavs arriving in the evac camps whiter than when they’d set out — immigrants and anyone who looked like an immigrant siphoned off before crossing certain state lines, the illegals deported and the legals held until their papers expired, or until nativist legislation could make them illegal. When Amnesty International confirmed the evac camps contained “thirty-one percent fewer people of Mexican and Central American descent than the population of pre-evacuation California,” the governor’s office issued a statement. A simple explanation, the press secretary said, migrant farm workers went home when drought hit, a victimless ebb in a lagging job market, simple depression arithmetic. Ray saw now how many had in fact been deposited here, in Limbo Mine, and in its innumerable sibling facilities. Los detenidos fantasmas—the ghost detainees.

Ray learned there was a women’s ward, and though he could never make his way to it, he spent meals and workouts describing Luz and Ig to anyone who would listen. “She’s skinny and brown, but doesn’t speak Spanish,” he said, as a means of distinction, “and the baby is very blond.” This often got a laugh.

In the mess cavern, detainees were served the ration colas and crackers Ray was accustomed to, but also a cold porridge he was not. The porridge was concocted to supply all the water and nutrients one needed, apparently with minimal waste. “Astronauts eat it,” said Ray’s cellmate, Sal, though this perfect food of astronauts looked a lot like creamed corn from a can and produced, in Ray’s case at least, considerable waste.

Sal was young and undeniably stupid, though his stupidity was of the rare variety that provoked envy in the more intelligent, rather than contempt, for it would surely leave the boy content for all his days. Sal, a baby-faced homebody who wore a rolled felt cowboy hat and seemed to mean it, had had the cell to himself for some time. Their bunks were anchored into the soft wall, and above each Sal had carved little crannies into the soapstone. He’d also sculpted a pedestal for his chamber pot, of which he generously offered Ray the use, with a magnanimity at first lost on Ray but soon found, thanks to the elucidation provided by the space-age corn porridge. On the wall opposite their bunks Sal had carved an entertainment center where he kept a crank-powered television he’d been given for good behavior, and a collection of curios also carved from talc. Talc was a bitch medium, Sal said, as delicate as it was beautiful. Like a gorgeous woman. Sal’s specialty was chess sets, and one of the first questions he asked was whether Ray knew how to play. Ray didn’t. “Me neither,” Sal admitted, and indeed closer examination of the shelves would reveal that what he called chess sets were simply talc statues of the entire casts of popular television shows like The Blobs and Star Cruiser and The Tabernacle Choir Sing-Along. “I intend to sell these as souvenirs,” Sal said, without stipulating when or where or to whom.

It had been a long time since Ray had watched TV — since the shaky satellite feed of the Super Bowl beamed into the barracks. TV was audacious now, he discovered, and it was hard to tell what was a joke and what was not. Pretty much nothing was, assured Sal, mentoring Ray through his TV routine. Together they binged with the volume down low, so as not to disturb their neighbors: first was Wake Up USA, then The Dish, and Your Body with Dr. Jax. Next came Sal’s soaps, The Ties That Bind and Thicker Than Water, during which Sal sneered and hissed and gasped, debriefing Ray with essential backstory only during commercials: “Ignacio is not a real priest”; “Hugo and Chrissy were engaged but then Francesca revealed that they were brother and sister. Of course, they’ll always love each other”; “Angela cannot be trusted.” Next came the game show Name That Brand, followed by America’s Funniest Car Crashes. After a lunchtime check-in with CrimeTV — currently offering nonstop coverage of the retrial of the Eugene Aqueduct Bombers — came Custody Battle!,Extreme Land Development: Mojav Edition, Spy in the Subdivision and after all that exhausting deceit and reinvention came the cool pool of Sasha, who was wide and wise and segued lovingly into the cold hard truth with her signature catch phrases, “Get set for real talk” and “Sasha gotcha!” Next was either Embalming with the Stars or its spinoff, Real Undertakers of Savannah, and then on to a few episodes of a widely syndicated sitcom called Friends of Bill W., about a group of regulars at an A.A. meeting. Then came Sixteen with HIV, Murder Bride, Midgets in Middle Management, and Shaker Heights, which profiled a team of spry elderly Shaker mountaineers. Next they watched the same six-minute episode of SportScrap three times in a row, killing time before the gritty meta-documentary series Where Are They Now? their favorite episodes of which were, in order,Birthed into a Toilet: Real Stories of Babies Whose Mothers Didn’t Know They Were Pregnant, Purrfect Fit: Real Stories of Jaguar-People on the Job Market and Shotgun Wedding: I Married an Inanimate Object.

There was the triumphant medical-inspirational dating show Leper Love Boat, whose life-affirmation was rivaled only by the brave men and one woman who risked their lives every day on Grain Bin Divers. Then came the news, which they skipped for dinner, and after dinner more reruns of Friends of Bill W., though this time on a different channel running a later season, which was like stepping out of the flow of time and hopping back in downstream, where sweet Katie H. was hiding her pregnancy from Kyle R., where Al-Anon made Hilda G. smug and Timmy S. and Nadine T. had to bring her back down to earth, where sassy Hannah L. married her sponsor and started popping pills, where fat Johnny V. worked his Overeaters Anonymous program and got skinny, where skinny Gene F. worked his Narcotics Anonymous program and got fat. Cigarettes were smoked, instant coffee was drunk, store-bought cake was cut, chips were collected, newcomers appeared, disappeared, then reappeared, people fell off the wagon then clawed their way back on. Oh, so many ups and downs on Friends of Bill W., where someone was always hitting rock bottom and pretty much everyone had been molested. A lot of triumph and a lot of tears — even during those bright early years on the morning block on the other channel, for Sal and Ray knew what dark days lay ahead. And yet, somehow, it all worked out, and at the end Ray believed the chant he and Sal whispered along with the gang: “It works if you work it, so work it, you’re worth it!”

Ray’s least favorite was the trivia show Cerebral Weasel, for he never knew any of the answers. His self-esteem recuperated during Money Dash, and his loins flared throughout prime time, which brought perhaps The Undead Sheriff, The Reluctant Clairvoyant or Torture Trio, a police procedural in which the CIA’s top three interrogators, all single, traveled to exotic rendition locales around the world. Another good one was Mind/Body, the erotic drama set in a mental ward, featuring an endless courtship between a Don Juan albino serial killer and his sultry young psychiatrist. Ray and Sal howled during Laughing Gas, a raunch-com about dentists innovating a myriad of ways to violate their unconscious patients, but only occasionally chuckled through two late-night shows whose topical opening monologues they never quite followed, and whose guests’ patter made them feel like disappointments, for the stars beseeched them to go see movies they never would. Sal grew defensive during these segments, and classified all the stars into three categories: gaylords, major sluts, and Scientologists. Ray often fell asleep during these interview portions, or during the sketch comedy show that followed, soothed to sleep by canned laughter.

Weekend mornings meant cartoons, which were made by computers now and cheapened for it, they agreed. But before those, on Sunday, while many other inmates went to Mass, was Ray’s absolute favorite: Sunday Java, where elderly commentators asked tough questions, like, Whatever happened to vacuum repair shops? And, What exactly are women carrying around in their giant purses? “Planners!” hooted Sal, incredulous. “Water bottles!” But Sunday Java ran solemn segments, too, genuine weepies featuring cancer babies whose lemonade stands outlived them and retarded boys who made Ig sounds shooting the game-winning baskets and mothers who nearly aborted the children who grew up to supply them with precious life-saving marrow or organ or blood. One Sunday Java segment, “On the Lam… with Gerald Hopson,” always made Ray hold his breath.

Gerald Hopson told the stories of fugitives — murderers and kidnappers, cult leaders and enemies of the state. He conjectured their whereabouts and encouraged viewers, whom he called citizens, to report any sightings to the proper authorities. In this regard, “On the Lam… with Gerald Hopson” was far from unique. But unlike his trench coat — clad counterparts, Gerald Hopson was genuinely fascinated by the moral ambiguity of the alleged crimes. He stressed that his subjects were innocent until proven guilty, and he speculated not only about their motives but also the conditions that might have driven them to thievery, fraud, or murder. Gerald Hopson pondered, with gravelly voice and swaying neck wattle, whether each of us had versions of these criminals inside us. The greatest injustice, Gerald Hopson proffered, was not the crime unsolved but the mind unknown, and it was this stain he begged his fellow citizens to scrub. “Answers to the questions are out there,” his closing monologue insisted, “and will be delivered us when the accused stands before the mantle of justice. Until then, they remain… on the lam.” That was a nice idea.

Limbo Mine was full of surprisingly nice ideas. Ray did not know how far down they were but found he did not miss the surface. Here it was always cool and dim, always a gentle lime twilight. The abandoned catacombs of desert sourdoughs had delivered him from the unrelenting sun, finally, left him with his notebook, the starlet’s buttery satchel, and his jug, though he hardly looked at these. Talc statuettes smiled down on him and the forgiving powder walls absorbed most unpleasant sounds. The TV went on and on, quietly, and simple Sal scraped his figurines and everything always worked out in the end.

—

It was somewhere in this cul-de-sac of routine that Sal ran out of characters to carve, and Ray suggested he make a politics set. “I like it,” said Sal. “More serious. Issues and shit.”

And like his work, Sal seemed to turn serious, too. The thing Ray needed to know about Sal was that Sal had a super active mind. He was, he admitted, something of a stimulus junkie. Add that to his ingenuity and he could be hard to keep up with.

“I’m UTW,” Sal would announce in what he called his language, which was not a language but a system of inscrutable acronyms. UTW meant Under the Weather, which meant depressed, which Sal had honestly become lately, but could not or would not say why.

At mealtimes there came “DYWYP?” pronounced dee-weep: Do You Want Your Corn Porridge? Ray always said he did but never seemed to.

“DYHAGBH?” pronounced dye-hag-buh meant, Do You Have a Girl Back Home?

There was “WYHAH?” pronounced why-ha: Where You Headed After Here?

Ray declined all of these conversational invitations.

Finally, from beneath the considerable shade of his cowboy hat, Sal admitted that he had come to find Ray a lacking roomie. In all the time Sal had been mateless, he had assembled a perfect bunkmate in his mind, built him mostly of TV clichés, and it turned out that Ray fell short of this ideal in nearly every single way.

“For one, you never ask me, ‘What’s your story?’” said Sal, which was true. Ray had drawn that line in his mind, because while he could describe Luz and Ig around Limbo Mine for purposes of finding them, to sit in the cell trading stories with Sal about where they came from and for whom their hearts ached would be to admit something that, despite the comforts of Limbo Mine, Ray was not ready to admit.

Sal said, “And we never talk philosophy, for example.”

Ray the disappointment said, “I’ve never really known what that means, philosophy.”

Sal sighed. “It’s one of those things that’s so all around you that you can’t see it.” He scraped at the talc president’s lapels. “It would help if you had something to tend.”

“To tend?”

“A mouse, say. Or a falcon. Maybe a snake you raised from an egg.”

“I don’t have anything to tend.”

“That’s POP,” said Sal. Part of the Problem. Another POP was that Ray never imparted to Sal any chestnuts of wisdom, nor, more troublingly, did he ever in turn ask Sal to expound upon his outlook on life, despite the fact that Sal was keeper of a vast bureaucracy of insight, much of which came to him on the chamber pot, his thinking throne, and which he punctuated by the tipping up then tipping down of his ten-gallon, like the hero on The Undead Sheriff.

“Are farts pure methane gas or are there poop particles mixed in?”

“Why do I feel ready to burst the second I take my pants down? Could the butthole have an auto-somatic reaction to fresh air?”

“Doesn’t it seem odorless? I think the porridge is engineered that way. Thus, our shit does not stink!”

Detainees awaiting relocation were required to write letters, weekly, to their sponsors. Ray’s were addressed to Aunt Hennie and Uncle Randy in Milwaukee, and while early epistles were generic and stillborn, Ray soon took to writing for the entire mandatory hour rather than risk more of Sal’s wisdom, for Sal seemed for some reason exempt from the weekly letter-writing session. Soon, Aunt Hennie and Uncle Randy metamorphosed in Ray’s mind, the lie of them shuddering silvery gunk from its wings. It was a familiar feeling, and he welcomed the reunion.

Aunt Hennie was of Hungarian stock, devout and stoic, but could turn blubbersome without warning. So emotionally repressed that she cried at commercials for cell phones and fast food but not at the deaths of either of her parents. When Ray came to visit she forced him to scoop big handfuls from a dish filled with M&M’s color-coordinated with the season. Every Christmas Aunt Hennie made a different gingerbread house, each year’s design more ambitious than the last — a Tudor with icing icicles and working lights, a Cape Cod with white chocolate shingles, a ski lodge made from pretzel logs, a Buddhist monastery, the White House, the Taj Mahal, the Sagrada Família. She worried about Uncle Randy, who was hard and like most men of his generation you had to lube with a few brewskis — local only, for he worked at one of the big brick breweries chugging on the waterfront. Only then would he talk at length about the boy he lost, Ray’s cousin Paco (Ray was not good with names), who fell through pond ice playing hockey. Paco had not even liked hockey, that Ray could recall, and even Aunt Hennie had wondered when Paco pulled his musty gear from the basement that bright snap of a morning. No one said suicide, but Uncle Randy said that Paco had always been both here and gone. He wished Aunt Hennie could put him from her mind, though he himself could not. Aunt Hennie and Uncle Randy were not perfect, but Ray envied how contained their problems were, not as diffuse and inoperable as black ink dripped into a glass of water. Ray came to enjoy writing them with all the normal advice he was never asked to give: Talk to her, Uncle Randy, I know you’re better than you think you are. What a salve to heal his beloved aunt and uncle this way, what a relief finally, after years of manning various bellows, to waft away a black cloud! But eventually Aunt Hennie and Uncle Randy’s failure to respond hurt his feelings.

—

One night, during the later late show, Sal said, “I don’t suppose you want to do any of the other cellmate stuff either?”

“Like what?”

“You know… HJ, BJ, RJ?”

Ray remembered guys in the barracks who announced their success by shouting “Here comes the cream sauce!” In high school some boys had a race in the back of the school bus. Supposedly they each let it off into a Dixie cup and the last one to finish had to drink it. Ray had not been invited to the back, had sat in the front of the bus with the girls and the born-again boys, a brush-off somehow repaired years later with Lonnie, when this new friend who thought he was so special asked Ray to please touch him, to please taste him, and Ray did, marveling how willing we become when simply asked nicely.

Ray was actually considering telling Sal this, was imagining how thrilled the kid would be to finally engage in what he called “genuine bondage,” when Luz appeared on the TV. Fragile and folded in another man’s arms, she looked shyly at the camera, as if by accident, then away. She laughed. They were on a beach, Luz and this man and their chums, all laughing and drinking wine coolers around a fire.

“That’s her,” said Ray. “My girl.” But when Sal looked, Luz was gone and Ray was once again a foolish young deserter whose pride was still wounded from not being invited to a circle jerk in the back of the school bus.

She’d been laughing a laugh he’d never seen before and could not hear. Perhaps she laughed that way before they met. Perhaps he had extinguished it, if not with his presence then with his leaving. He knew it was a trick of the light, the camera, the music and the jumpy cuts, but she’d been having so much fun there. He’d never seen her have that kind of fun. She was throwing her head back with abandon, and even as Ray could hear the director saying, Throw your head back with abandon, he wondered why he’d never glimpsed that gesture or its cousins in all their time together.

That night and for many after he dreamed of Luz in all the ways he’d never seen her. In a robe, pouring coffee and wiping the sleep crud from her eyes. In a party dress wrapping a gift, asking him to put his finger on the knot so she could make a bow. Repotting a plant, a smudge of soil on her forehead. Curled in sleep beside Ig on a blue, velvet-looking duvet, Ig reminding him of all the ways to say Come home.

One night, Sal came down to Ray’s bunk and held Ray as he wept. “Is it your girl?” he whispered.

“My family,” Ray managed. He was not sure whom he meant — it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell who was make-believe, who was waiting for him and where. He wished he’d told his mother it was a dream catcher, not a prism, that would keep Lucy’s nightmares away.

“That’s tough,” said Sal, a decent clamp on his delight.

“It is,” said Ray.

Sal grew hard against him. Ray allowed this. He had not been touched in a long, long time. Sal kindly stroked Ray’s mangy hair. “You miss your people?”

“Yeah,” Ray choked. “I have a little daughter. Little tow-headed girl who needs me.”

Sal rubbed himself against Ray as he spoke. “You poor thing. I can only imagine what it’s like to have family aboveground. Being separated. Being alone. I hated being alone. That’s why I was so glad when you came.” He ground his dick into the small of Ray’s back.

“You didn’t have anyone,” Ray said.

Sal grunted. “No one. But at least I got over to see Mom here and there.”

Ray pulled away slightly. “Your mom’s down here?”

“Of course,” said Sal, reaching.

“You were arrested together?”

Sal held Ray tighter and resumed his grind. “What are you talking about, arrested?”

“Taken in or whatever,” Ray said. “Detained.”

“You don’t know?” Ray could feel Sal trembling with the giddiness of finally telling his story.

Ray was trembling, too. “I don’t. I’m sorry. Tell me.”

Sal shuddered against him. “I was born in here.”

Sal never finished his politics chess set. “No one knows any of the politicians,” he said. “Or maybe they know the name but not what the dude looks like and not, like, his job. Plus those guys all look the same.”

The project aborted, Ray asked if he could have one of the few pieces Sal had finished: Baby Dunn. Sal had carved her bundled in a blanket, little soapstone chrysalis with big watery eyes. Sal said yes, keep her forever, but Ray would not. Ray would realize he’d forgotten the talisman, left talc Baby Dunn behind in his cell, only as he was inching himself stealthily up an air duct, his satchel slung around him, licking his hands and rubbing the spit on his bare feet where the talc made them slippery.

When Ray finally reached a ceiling in the duct he found it blistering. This he could tell when he scooted his face up near and confirmed by touching the back of his hand to it, as a fireman visiting his elementary school had long ago instructed. It was either the surface of the mine or some fire was burning on the other side. But what choice had he? The air shaft yawned below, six or seven stories of it by now, his limbs were quivering, and even if he survived the fall only Limbo Mine awaited him. He heaved himself against the hatch, hulked his puny mass against it, jamming his legs against the duct best he could without falling, urged his body against this barrier, which he somehow knew was his last, heaved himself again up and out into flames.

They went only to his eyes, his eyelids gone translucent for all the protection they brought. His eyeballs boiled on in their sockets even with Ray’s palms pressing the magma from them. Beneath him was not ash but dust, scorching all the same, the sun of suns branding his larval, cave-paled skin. He felt for the satchel where it hung from him, retrieved Sal’s liberated ten-gallon and donned it, though its shade did not register. He crawled to make his escape. He scrambled one way and then another, not certain if he was inching back toward Limbo Mine or if a guard was standing over him, smirking. All the parts of his eyes he didn’t have names for were crisp, rattling hulls. He felt the duct and the hatch he’d pushed off. He curled up beneath the hatch as though it could hide him and lay there for some time, baking and blind, listening for trucks.

None came, and eventually his brain registered the lifting of his eyelids as faint reddening, which gave way to an oscillating green-black, as though he were looking at an overcast night sky through night vision goggles. He came out from under the hatch. The first shapes he saw with his new sight were crosses, which came to him as gashes of red light. They were for the Indian massacre, some people said. For William Randolph Hearst’s stillborn babies, or for the wives he bluebearded. For the innocent victims of drunk driving, or the drunks themselves, catapulted off the shoulderless highway now buried. Be-low the crosses, he knew, the Spanish tile of Clay Castle gleamed in the sun like an oasis, and beyond that the dune sea, a laceration of light in the distance, utterly reconfigured in the months since he’d last seen it, yet as fearful, as transfixing.

Ray knew he had to move. Insisting to himself that if necessary the red-green forms materializing and dissolving before him would coalesce into a sinkhole or a truck coming, he slid down the opposite side of the hill on his ass, his limbs still noodly and light, not behaving in a predictable way whatsoever. He could not determine whether it was night or day. The sky was a pit above but also somehow aglow, the new horizon a shimmering smear and very far away.

The dune tugged him. His world was a photo negative of itself, a kind of heat vision except the world was all heat. As he walked, purples and oranges came onto the scene, first faint at the borders, then lurid. Colors he’d not seen in a long time somersaulted across his field of vision — Technicolor cells on parade, lackadaisical psychedelia, rainbows prismed then collapsing, the drought of droughts through a kaleidoscope. He knew these colors to be unreal — symptoms of a shorted-out ocular nerve, a spent rod or cone, a fried disc somewhere — but still, they were company. He would find Luz and describe all this to her, she who had always been so hungry for color.

He walked and watched the show, occasionally slurping handfuls of corn porridge from the satchel he’d filled with it. At some point, the colors from his burned eyes seemed to repose onto the real. Auras, Lonnie said, pleased with himself somewhere. The alluvial fan beneath him was an essential beige flecked with urgent orange. One rocky wash was welcoming lavender, and so he spent the night. Behind him, the mountains concealing Limbo Mine throbbed a cautionary rust. The sun was indifferent black, or some days a deep, infinite navy. And in the distance, always, the dune sea shimmered in sublime, hypnotic, opalescent blue, the color of water at the shallow end of a swimming pool, with a pretty girl’s suntan oil sliding on its surface. His damaged sight, though he had stopped thinking of it this way, led him there.

Upon entering the dune sea, he set the modest goal of walking in only one direction. South, maybe. But even this got difficult when his footprints disappeared behind him and the ridges around him shifted from north-south to east-west. But the heartcolors stayed with him, and he continued to let them guide him. He heeded effervescent streaks of emerald, an earnest path of peach. If a valley was spiteful olive gray he went around, then watched from a distant ridge as a sandalanche slid silently to fill it. If a slope of sandy ripples shone a chirpy robin’s-egg, he climbed them as though they were the front steps of his own house.

At some point he crested a day-long dune and saw nothing but more dune. Sand stretched out on all sides and above, for he was nowhere near summiting even the foothills of the Six Sisters. But instead of terror he grasped what made these dunes a sea, and for the first time felt the serenity of that. He was as at home here as he had been bobbing on his board, seeing nothing but sky and the Pacific. A real good, deep-oblivion kind of feeling.

In this state, he carried all hurts past and present and future. He thanked his blisters, befriended his burns, watched his migraine move around his head the way he might have watched Ig pull Luz around a playground. Pain had its favorite spots — his headaches preferred the nook beneath his eyebrows, heat rash his armpits, and sting nested in the crook of his groin, probably for the shade. Ray made room for these. People and things came to him, and he pretended not to notice.

Some were hard to ignore. Lucy walking boneless was a beautiful thing. He did not turn to see Luz and Ig beside him, for fear of evaporating them, but he did slow down so Ig could keep up. He spoke to some, saying, “I appreciate the offer, Uncle Randy, but this is something I have to do myself.”

His sturdier companions were his talc hack, his satchel and his jug. Though he felt a little bad about taking it, Sal’s ten-gallon was like God’s awning overhead. He touched it when he needed to pin down what was real.

Some nights he thought he heard that worrisome banshee shriek way off, though perhaps it was imagined. Either way, he dropped immediately to the ground, made himself flat as a river stone.

He was, after everything, a Hoosier and a guest and so when he dipped his hand into the satchel and found his porridge finished he said, “If I may, sand dune, you are not going to kill me.” When his jug went dry he said, “I beg your pardon, dune sea, but I am just here to get my girls. If you would kindly. This is not my first desert, you see. I am not done with my life — I’d say I’m about halfway through. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I am a young white man in America and we typically do quite well here. So if you will excuse me.”

He found he was no longer afraid of losing Luz, or of loving Ig — he was content to have those two throbbing slabs of his heart outside his body, walking around. If only he could find them. All he asked was to watch them make their rounds, and occasionally to press them up to their puny kindred plugging away inside him. His vision went a-swamp. He did not know whether they were alive, and if alive where — perhaps even back at Limbo Mine, in some hidden grotto. But he pressed onward along routes of affectionate coral and welcoming teal. He did not know where he was walking but he knew why. He would, he realized, find them or spend the rest of his life looking, and this might not take so long. So be it. All he had ever needed, in that desert or this, was some say in how it went, some reassurance that he would go doing something worthwhile. A sappy idea, but not therefore false. And while his life, it seemed, had been an archipelago of ambiguity and abstraction and impossibility, here was something he could grasp: a designer bag greasy from gruel, a ten-gallon hat. My girl and my baby two days back. This was what faith looked like: a phosphorescent world showing the way, a beautiful rose-colored vulture with a cherry-juice beak weaving through the white-hot sky, circling him, then landing at his feet. When the vulture became a great blue heron and the heron a tarp, Ray shrouded himself in it — precious shade, the canvas of discarded wagons — and walked in the direction from which it came.

THE GIRLS

We knew something was going down when he kicked us out of the Rambler. Get out, he said, just like that. Like it wasn’t our monastery, our vestibule, and hadn’t we just delivered him?

JIMMER

An unnatural portrait, I admit, the girls huddled outside the Rambler that way, and the Rambler off by itself. Not right. But he couldn’t let the girl go. Baby Dunn, though she was not a baby anymore.

CODY

I thought we were to leave the Rambler with them in it. I did. The ripple was on and then done and still no one went near it. No one said not to. We just knew.

DALLAS

Ig was with me — she always was then. Luz root-gone and derelict. Shameful. I nearly knocked on the Rambler and told her so, but then they came out.

THE GIRLS

Somehow they were more than two, the two of them. Levi, who taught us that monogamy was a prison built by gynophobic capitalism, that public affection was a bludgeon unless it was extended to all. And here was the proof, her in his arms in front of all of us, ignoring the ripple.

CODY

Until then he had loved each of us with the same heart, if that makes sense.

JIMMER

Certainly the landscape had some significance. The Rambler by itself as we others rippled to that new place on the high plain, tufts of dead sagebrush all around us. Levi out in the open with this Baby Dunn wrapped around him. The sage would have cured us all, in other circumstances.

DALLAS

He’d never anointed any woman this way, though he’d had all of us.

CODY

And with all of us there, like we knew, like he wanted us to see.

DALLAS

Of course he wanted us to see. He knows exactly what he’s doing at all times.

THE GIRLS

And there was nothing to do but watch.

CODY

I keep seeing it in my mind, even now. I don’t know why, except that it was one of those few moments when you are in it and above it at the same time. One of those rare moments when you know you’re swinging on a hinge in your life.

DALLAS

Things were changing, or were just about to, and everyone could feel that.

JIMMER

And down comes this cowboy harbinger.

CODY

Some wild man out of the dune. How he survived I don’t know. Stumbling down the slope and grinning. Fucking grinning.

THE GIRLS

We saw him and we saw her see him and we saw him see him.

JIMMER

A triangle of very high-pitched energy, and all of us caught inside it.

CODY

That step she took was it, looking back.

DALLAS

Levi put Luz down and she took one step away from him, a big step, bigger than seemed possible.

THE GIRLS

We saw it, yes. A divot in the sand where she had been, and another where she stood now.

JIMMER

And the sand between these absolutely pristine. That was crucial, from my perspective.

DALLAS

Levi’s arms still raised in the shape of her.

JIMMER

It was finished in that step, though its finishing took some time.

THE GIRLS

It hurt to witness, honestly.

CODY

And we all stayed there, even after she took Ig and the three of them walked to the Blue Bird. We stood waiting to see where to go, I guess.

JIMMER

Until the sand whispered around our ankles.

DALLAS

After we moved the Rambler we were drawn back to the Blue Bird, waiting.

CODY

We stayed there until bonfire, like the day Luz came, except Dallas was with us, pacing.

THE GIRLS

Locked out of her own place, which wasn’t right.

JIMMER

Pacing foretells ill fortune. Doubly when the pacer is a mother.

THE GIRLS

When Luz came out it was dark and she was a different woman. The baby held her hand.

CODY

She did seem changed, I guess you’d say.

JIMMER

Like she’d found a sachet of bird beaks in the eaves and had emerged to fling them out.

THE GIRLS

We needed so much from her.

DALLAS

But all she said was, He’s asleep.

Luz told the rubberneckers outside the Blue Bird that Ray was asleep and took Ig on one of their old walks around the transmuted colony, surveying the new high plain.

Luz chawed some brute root as she walked, feeling the fungal juices leech into her gums before she spat, taking in the new territory. Here and there among the structures were haystack clumps of dead roots, half-entombed in sand. “What is?” asked Ig, and Luz said she did not know. The harvest moon was fat and orange overhead. Ig said, “What is?” and thereafter never tired of whispering its name.

What did it mean to have Ray back? All the anger she’d succored to starve her grief had boiled off upon seeing him, and she was not sure what would fill that space. She was waiting for it perhaps, weaving through the domes and shanties in their new constellations, looking for what would grow in her now that he’d made room.

The bonfire was somber that night, musicless and sparsely attended. The fire itself was paltry, though Ig still grunted her wanting it, staggering toward the blaze in her light-ups and whining tragically when Luz picked her up. Luz was sad not to see Levi there, and her sadness revealed that she’d come looking for him. She could continue looking — she had seen the silhouette of his dome out on the edge of the colony — but knew she would not.

Instead, she lingered on the periphery with Ig in her arms, gazing into the fire. Comparisons insisted. Ray’s crescent hip bones and Levi’s heaving, hair-damp chest. Ray’s flat feet and the cracked yellow callus where the two smallest toes on Levi’s right foot once were. Where Ray was riding waves, Levi was half-buried; where Ray was whisking along whitecaps, Levi was hunkered. Where Ray was leaning into the curves, Levi was arms outstretched. Where Ray was brittle grapevine, Levi was boulder. Where Ray was a liquid slug sluicing down the canyon, Levi was the Amargosa’s solid sandstone foot. She was drawn to Levi the way Ig was drawn to fire — she should fear him but did not. Meanwhile, going back to Ray was like rolling down a hill.

—

Once she’d touched Ray she’d not been able to stop. They sat on the floor of the Blue Bird, her silently stroking his bizarrely soft and white fingertips and speaking only to remind him to drink.

“I thought you were dead,” she said finally. “I have to keep touching you until you’re alive again.”

“I feel very much alive,” he said.

“You look different,” she said, “but the same.” He was thinner, burnt, with new shading in his face, impossible to map. Bloody crescents where some fingernails had been. But he was hers: fine mouth and prophet eyes. Delivered her by some great benevolent hand. She could not deny that.

“You look just like I remember,” he said. Though he was burnt all over he let Ig into his lap. He kissed the baby and burbled her stomach. She squealed and pinched her fingers together and Luz taught Ray how that meant more.

All his months in Limbo Mine, months that had not passed in that out-of-time place, that had instead hovered, waiting, at the surface, that had shuddered behind him as he walked, came upon him then. Lost time flooded through him. His tears came—“I guess I’ve missed a lot”—and then hers. Luz asked where he had been, and through Ig’s demands and diversions he told her, told her everything, even all that was madness.

When he described the attack the night before the rangers found him, she showed him the scarf she had stuffed into the cushion. “Here,” she said, stretching the wrinkled silk taut. “Levi brought me this.”

“Yes,” he said, touching the rusty stain. “That must’ve been where they hit me.”

“Who?” Luz asked, and Ig said, “Ooo, ooo, ooo.”

Ray said, “I’m not sure.”

Luz also gave him the Leatherman. He looked at it for a very long time. “This was my dad’s,” he said.

“I didn’t know,” she said.

He took her face in his hands and they both checked to see if she would allow this. She did, but his hands felt like a skeleton version of Levi’s and soon she pulled away. They were silent awhile before Luz said, “What do I look like to you?”

Ray was confused. She added, “With your eye thing. What are you seeing now?”

“It’s sort of pink in here, pink and yellow-orange. Sunset colors, a lovely sunset, and you’re like a happy purple cloud on the horizon.”

“A happy cloud. And Ig?”

Ig was luminous, with dark, hard feet. She was the same size as when he left her, but her head was larger, with spots larger than freckles sprayed along her hairline. “Sun spots. From the Melon.” He wept again as she told the story of their afterworld.

Luz was quiet for some time. Her shimmer evaporated. She went dark as coal. “You left us,” she said finally.

“I know. I’m—”

“I mean, you left us to die.”

“No, I… Yes. I was afraid. I convinced myself I was doing it for you, but it was for me.”

“I fucking know that,” she said. “You’re not telling me any news.” She took a gash of root from her pocket and nibbled it ferociously. “Everything was like that.”

“Everything?”

“You were always convincing me I was a burden. That I needed taking care of. I felt like an infant at the end, and then you left me with one.”

“I know, babygirl.”

Luz croaked.

“I’m sorry,” said Ray. “Habit. Goddamn it, I’m sorry.” He sobbed some, binding his hands with the stained scarf. Luz had been so small on Sal’s TV, smaller still as he’d come down from the dune sea. He’d known it was her immediately, folded into another man’s arms, as she always was. He wanted to be those arms, but knew he never had been and did not deserve to be now. And yet here he was, trying, and in this way he was as selfish as ever, more. Luz was maybe happy without him — no, he would not allow for that. When he touched her, she’d softened. She was his home, and he hers — he still believed that. Finally he said, “I needed you to need me, I see that now. I thought you were my project. I was so afraid, Luz, and I didn’t know how to love someone who didn’t need me. And you didn’t need me, and you don’t now. I know that… But, have me? Please have me. If you’ll have me I’ll deserve you.”

Ig wedged herself between them and let loose a high, jealous hum. “She’s been doing this,” Luz said, though this was in fact the first time she’d seen it; until now she’d only heard about it from Dallas. “Remember that moan she used to do? It’s more like a hum now.” They waited for Ig to do it again, but Ig was nobody’s wag.

Luz looked at Ray, found him repentant and tender and tired. She unwound the scarf from his hands and returned it to the cushion. “You need to sleep.”

—

Now, with Ig gone slack in her arms and the few people tending the dying bonfire giving her a wide berth, Luz wanted to take her own advice, wanted to sleep — but where? She remembered what the others said, about the dune curating, about being open to signs and omens. Why had she not accepted its grace sooner — why had she slid into her old stingy self?

Levi’s dome summoned from the desert. Instead, she walked beyond the encampment, away from the dune sea. Among the sandy clumps of roots she came upon a downed tree, long dead, its branches burnt to nubs and its silvery trunk twisted like a hank of wet hair. Tomorrow someone from the colony would find it and hack it up for firewood. Everything she saw would go that way, someday.

—

Ray woke late that night, terrified. Luz and Ig were asleep beside him in the school bus, but from somewhere nearby came an atrocious and familiar yowl. He made his way outside and through the shanties and tents and RVs toward the strange banshee sound he’d learned to fear in the desert. At the edge of the colony, he found the source of that sickening shriek: a gangrenous-colored lorry, with roll bars and K.C. lights, Luz’s man and another tending to it.

Rage rose in Ray like water in a basin. Luz’s man was big, his bigness the first and second and third thing you noticed about him. He had wide meaty hands and a beefy face that shone violently in the dawn. His buddy — weasely and quick, the kind of guy who noticed everything — said something to him and the bastard turned, saw Ray, and waved.

You look just like I remember, Ray had told Luz, his only lie. Something was different about her, not just her darkened skin or wind-thinned hair or the sand all over her. Beneath all that, she was caved in, fervent. Manic but vacant. A little mad, maybe, or just saddled with a mighty hurt, Ray would have said if Sal or Uncle Randy asked after her. Suddenly it was clear that the big man was to blame not only for Ray’s injuries but Luz’s too.

Ray waved back.

Luz’s big man and his helper mounted the lorry and tore off into the dune sea.

—

Out beyond the colony, a formation of red, wind-rounded stones rose from the husks of chaparral. A few days later, when he was well enough, Ray invited Luz and Ig to accompany him to the formation.

There, Luz found herself answering the questions she’d so often asked when she first arrived, found herself often saying the name so often said to her.

Ray helped Ig summit a boulder. “Levi. He’s the dowser? The one Lonnie told us about? He runs this place?”

“It’s so much more than that.”

Her adoration cranked a vise on Ray’s chest. But he and Luz had spent that first night together, and the three nights since, and though she’d refused his advances, the nights themselves were something. He and Luz had doled out some pain to Levi in those hours.

“He finds water,” she said.

Ig hurled herself into Ray’s arms. He said, “Tell me about him.”

Luz did, her voice shimmering with reverence, bristling with golden zeal. Ray heard it and also another, a gravelly voice from near memory. He saw in his mind a Sunday morning figure, intrepid and windblown on location, marching out the facts with steady indigo objectivity.

He’s a scientist, a naturalist. But those words are so deficient. You know that sense we always had that we were missing something? That there was something fundamentally wrong in the way we approached the natural world? You said that, once. The Amargosa looks barren but it’s teeming with life. He’s the reason all these people are here. Why they came and why they stay. He keeps all of us alive. He finds water… ephemeral rivers, nearly instant… the equivalent of coral reefs. He’s… touched. You know I scoff at this as much as you do, but it’s true… He’s walked through some dark spaces to get where he is… learned to listen to the rocks and sand and earth… the uranium spoke to him. In a hundred years we’ll have a completely different understanding of the natural world, thanks to him. He’s like Darwin, or Lewis and Clark… a seismic shift in the way we understand the environment… blending of the spiritual and the natural. Everything’s connected and he can feel the strings. I feel drawn to him, I guess, since you’ve been gone… made me grow in ways I didn’t know I could. Tenderhearted… demanding… Yucca Mountain… Operation Glassjaw… A prophet, I guess you would say. It’s like the world is bigger because of him — he can see in a different way — like you! And he’s a giver like you — he gives himself to everyone here. You would like him, Ray.

Citizens, I come to you today from the Mojave Desert. Behind me lies the Amargosa Dune Sea, the only known landmass of its kind, what geologists call a pseudo-spontaneous phenomenon, a superdune, a symbol of the drought that has wrecked the American West. It has collapsed agri-business as we know it, sending millions of refugees, known colloquially as Mojavs, fleeing the Southwest, desperately seeking shelter — and resources. It’s a landscape we all recognize, emblematic of a drama each of us is familiar with. But could this superdune be hiding a secret?… Some call him a dowser, some call him a visionary, others say he is a fugitive who may even have access to nuclear weapons… He is believed to have fled here, to the Amargosa Dune Sea, though how he might survive here remains a mystery… a whistle-blower to some, to others a disgruntled employee… accused of stealing state secrets… accused of polygamy… linked to the disappearance of a female coworker… train bombing in Albuquerque… extremist radical views… ransacking aid convoys… Sunday Java unearthed this exclusive photo in which we see the burnt frames of two lorries belonging to the Red Cross… Or is he, as some say, a prophet, possessed of a rare gift much needed in this barren, blighted wilderness? We cannot know until he is brought to justice. For now he remains… on the lam.

Ray listened to them both. Luz was trying not to hurt him, he could tell, and he was trying to determine whether she was in love with this supposed dowser. When Luz told him she had something she wanted him to see, Ray followed her back to the bus, hoping whatever it was would prove she was not. A consolation he would be denied.

She went to the glove compartment and handed him a notebook. Ray sat down and skimmed it. Luz hovered manic as a hummingbird as he paged through sketches and scrawl — a madman’s manifesto.

As he read, Ray fingered the scar at his hairline. Everything’s connected, Luz had said, and it felt so then. It seemed he could wiggle the divot of waxy tissue on his forehead and a little bell would ring at the dowser’s bedside.

Luz sat before him, her knees folded under her, expectant. “Isn’t it amazing?”

Ray did not know how to begin. “What does that mean, babygirl? To ‘liberate’ a bunch of uranium?”

“It’s a way of listening.”

Ray scratched his chin.

Luz said, “He found Ig and me that way. We’re supposed to be here.”

“For what? Why?”

“The Amargosa is a wasteland because they need it to be a wasteland, see? If Baby Dunn and her baby are here, thriving—”

“Baby Dunn? What are you talking about?”

“We disrupt that narrative. It’s about showing us as humans. A chosen people.”

“You said you hated all that Baby Dunn shit.”

“Me and Ig. Videos of us gardening, taking a bath. Make them think they discovered us.”

“You and Ig? That’s insane. Don’t you realize what would happen if they saw you, her?”

Luz stood up. “You’re not getting it. We’re the rallying cry.”

Ray pressed his hands against his face then looked up at her. “Has he been taking Ig?”

“What?”

“I don’t want him alone with her.”

“What are you talking about? I’m trying to tell you how special this place is. It’s in danger. They could come any day. If we don’t do something.”

Ray stood, holding up the primer. “Says Levi.”

“We’re under assault here, Ray. I think I can help.”

“Help how? Turning us in?”

“You’re asking the wrong questions.”

“What’s the most likely scenario here, Luz?”

Luz shook her head, disappointed. “Why is it so difficult for you to believe that I could be useful here?”

“I’m saying it doesn’t make sense.”

“You’d think that with all that you’ve seen — are still seeing — you could open yourself to the unknown.”

In fact, Ray’s visions were fading. Even now, as he watched Ig bobble around the bus, she was only faintly opal. Luz was a mute slate, and the light pressing on the blankets told him nothing. His heartcolors would be gone by sunset. Ray said, “I heard a story about him on the news, in Limbo Mine.”

Luz scoffed. “The news.” She tossed the news out the bus window.

“He’s a criminal.”

“So are we.”

“He’s a liar. A fraud.”

“You don’t want to talk to me about liars and frauds,” she said.

Ray was silent.

“He finds water, Ray. You’ve been drinking it.”

“He steals it, Luz.”

“You don’t get it. It doesn’t matter what anyone says about him.”

“He hijacks aid convoys. I saw photos of the aid convoys on fire. That’s where he gets the water.”

“He wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Him and his guys cracked my fucking skull.”

“No—”

“He might have killed people, Luz! There’s a missing woman—”

Luz said, “Why are you trying so hard to belittle what we have here?” She put something into her mouth.

“What is that you keep chewing?”

“It helps me breathe.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Goddamn it, Ray! You’re treating me like a fucking toy. After all this, I’m still a doll to you. It’s easier for you to imagine some criminal conspiracy than to think I could be useful.”

“It’s not about you, Luz — it’s about him.”

“I know it is! I thought you were dead, Ray.”

“You’ve said that. And I’ve said I’m sorry.”

“I will keep saying it until you understand exactly what it means. I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead because that’s what you wanted me to think.”

“I didn’t—”

“I thought you were dead. Dead, Ray!”

Ray hurled the primer to the far end of the bus. “And who told you I was? He did. He was the one on that lorry — the one who attacked me—”

“Don’t.”

“I’m fucking sure of it.”

Ig was not crying — she was watching — but Luz went to her as though she were. She lifted Ig and held her. She had never been more a mother than when she opened the back door of the Blue Bird and in a voice fossilized with resolve told Ray, “You need to find another place to sleep.”

Ray drifted through the colony. Where exactly did Luz expect him to go? He passed RVs with foil over all their windows, tents, the black hand of ash where a fire had been. He passed a man in a teepee, napping, his features obscured by sun and sand and fuchsia mottling like some new map across one side of his face. Ray walked in circles, and each time he passed the man Ray glanced at him. The sun relentless, he eventually lay in the teepee’s shrinking shadow and tried to sleep.

When he woke the old man stood above him. “You were thrashing around,” he told Ray. “Shouting things.”

“Was I?” Ray tried to blink the stains from the old man’s face, angered by the last remnants of the visions that had led him here, their whimsical obstruction.

“Arsenic poisoning,” the man said. He retreated to the shade inside the teepee and gestured with his jumpy hand for Ray to join him. “You’re Luz’s man.”

Ray shrugged. “I was.”

“I’m Jimmer.” He extended his hand.

“Ray.”

“Back from the dead. Where are they keeping the dead these days?”

“Limbo Mine. You know it?”

“Not from experience.”

“Glad to hear that.” Ray tried to avoid staring at Jimmer’s face.

“Domestic dispute?”

Ray nodded.

Jimmer nested a cloth inside a fisherman’s cap and donned it. “Luz said you were a surfer. Do I recall that correctly?”

“Used to be.”

“Well, let’s not sit here staring at each other.”

Jimmer instructed Ray to shoulder two flattened oblong petals of tin, each with four holes punched in it, two loops of rope tied through these. Together, they walked into the dune sea.

“See those?” Jimmer pointed back across the shrinking valley, toward the troubling range where clouds made a calico of the sky. “Gonna have a helluva sunset tonight. One upside to those mountains.”

They walked on, the colorless sand sucking at their feet. After some time Jimmer pointed at a steep crescent peak two ridges over. “That’ll do,” he said. They pressed on, drizzling sweat. Struggling up the final slope, Ray’s calves began to spasm. “I wouldn’t mind a lift,” he said. “A towline, even.”

“They’ll install all those soon as this thing stops.”

“You think it’ll stop?”

“Never.”

They reached the top of the big ridge, lungs screaming.

“Air is stingy up here,” said Jimmer.

Ray said, “I feel it.”

The sheets of tin were baking as Ray laid them on the sand. Jimmer showed him how to bind his feet to his board with the rope loops, across the toes, around the ankle and back across the heel. They sat this way, on the lip of the dune, tin obelisks strapped to their feet, the colony below miniature in the shadow of those wicked granite teeth beyond, until Jimmer said, “After you, young man.”

Ray stood and leaned down the dune. The sand shifted beneath him, ceded to gravity, and he slid. He glided, faster and faster, beating his arms for balance until the dune bit the edge of his board and threw him down. He came up cackling. Jimmer followed after, bit it, came up shouting, “Goddamn it, that’s important!”

Onward they slid. They trembled. They tumbled. They moved first like tentative leaves falling softly from the summit, then in wide dreamy arcs, and finally swift and daring as diving swallows. Sensation throbbed in their groins, their abdomens, their inner ears and trembling glutes. It was a kind of flying, gliding across the sand, swishing down and the air suddenly nipping, cooling where they sweated, which was everywhere. They crowed Wheeee at the summit and Again at the base. When they fell they somersaulted, coating themselves with albino dusting. When they gathered speed they thrust their giddy fists into the air, for it was a surprise every time. They carved the dune and climbed it again, climb and carve and fly and sing, letting loose all the joyous cries that might have otherwise died inside them.

In time, Jimmer and Ray sat at the summit, panting. Ray surveyed the colony below, looking, he realized, for a way out.

“I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting to do this,” Jimmer said. “I went snowboarding once, as a kid. Once. Course I mighta dreamt it. Always wanted to move somewhere with snow.” He made an hourglass of his hand, let sand slip through. “But I had a nice little homestead. I had a canyon all to myself. I put a statue down there when my boy went, then another, built a bridge, a walkway, carved a scene into the cliffside, I couldn’t stop. Wife left; I hardly noticed. Though she would say I’m the one who left.”

“What happened to it?” asked Ray. “Your canyon?”

“The dune came and took it. What I remember most was how quiet it was. I’d always wanted to go out there with a shotgun. Blow it all to smithereens. But the dune just slipped over it, like a clean bedsheet. Merciful, I guess I thought.”

For the first time, the word seemed right to Ray, especially here, in sight of those toothy peaks, so forbidding opposite the soft swooping embrace of the dune sea. The heartcolors had left him now, but the sun had set, and as Jimmer predicted, the clouds snagged on the new range, aflame. Ray did not miss his visions — he missed Luz, wanted to ask Jimmer the secret to keeping her, though he thought he knew. When he’d been able to pry her away from Levi, the old Luz surfaced. In the weeks since he returned, Luz and Ig had spent every night with Ray in the bus. He didn’t want to know all that had happened between Luz and the dowser — didn’t blame her, no, but didn’t want to know the details, either. She’d tried to tell him sometimes, in the dark, but he’d stop her. It doesn’t matter, he’d say. It all happened for a reason, she’d say. But really Ray did not want to invite the man between them that way. And though he would never say so, it was, he supposed, a story he knew from before, the same that sent them up into the canyon. But this new devotee Luz was bristling, unpredictable, and he didn’t want to spook her. Nights together or no, something pulled her back to Levi, Ray knew, and he had been intent on giving her no reason to follow that pull — no guilt and no conditions. Everything clean between them. But that was ruined now.

Below, someone had started a fire. Black smoke helixed skyward and disappeared. Nearby, on a big, palm-flat rock, was the dome Ray knew belonged to Levi. Alone, apart, the first time it’d been so, Jimmer said. The dome glowed from within as darkness came, lovely, Ray had to admit.

—

Luz tried to nap but the Blue Bird was poisoned, the bad air from the fight pressing heavy on her. She tidied up the bus, returned the abused primer to the glove box and took Ig for a walk.

Levi’s dome had been relocated to a flat, rust-red rock from which radiated tremendous heat. In the center of the dome was a pile of stones baked in a nearby fire. Luz entered and was immediately surprised by the intensity inside; she had not known it could get hotter.

Levi lay nearly naked on his stone floor, shining. “Sweat lodge,” he said. “The heat in this rock was absorbed before you or I were born. Slow the heart rate. Essentialize the thought processes. Reduce to its basicmost pathways. Go through fight or flight and out the other side. To clarity and truth.”

He invited her to disrobe and feel it. She felt a primal urge to do just that. The happiest slivers of her girlhood had been spent on a beach towel on a rhombus of dead lawn in Pasadena, thinking of nothing except absorbing the sun, of the air moving around her setting a chill to the sweat shimmering on her upper lip, of evading the sundial trajectory of the finger of shade cast by the single palm in their neighbor’s yard, of an insect screaming near her ear or a snowball of sweat rolling from the scoop of her sacrum into her butt crack. But mostly, there on the towel, she had wondered what she would look like one day, when she was tan or when she was thin, and would there be lines here or creases here? Would there be unwelcome hairs, cellulite pocking? In all her hours lying in the sun and thinking, she had never concentrated on important things, never asked herself difficult questions. She wished now that she had.

Her impulse to join Levi was tempered not only by Ig on her hip, cranky from her truncated nap, but by the pair she’d passed as she’d entered the dome, a girl called Rachel, sex-flushed, and Cody, who failed to meet Luz’s gaze, squeezing Ig’s bare foot instead. Though Luz knew she had no right to be hurt, she was.

Levi tipped water over the rocks, and they watched it hiss instantly to steam. “You’ll want to sit,” he said. “Heat rises.”

She sat across from him and tried to coax Ig into her lap, but the girl was interested only in climbing on and off Levi’s cot. “Let her,” Levi said.

Luz began. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by. Since… Ray…”

“We don’t own each other, Luz.”

“I know. It’s just… complicated.”

“Complications are human inventions.”

“I know,” she said, “but I’m feeling—”

“Come over here.”

“I just wanted to tell you—”

“I can’t talk to you when you’re way over there.”

Luz moved close enough to feel a swell of heat coming off him. “You’re burning up,” she said.

“That’s the idea,” he said. “Important decisions to be made. I’m going deep within for answers.” He meant the wall of rock coming at them, she knew, and other decisions too.

Luz said, “He’s Ig’s father.”

Levi put his hand on the back of her neck and shook his head. “So you’re lying to me? Closing off again?”

“No, I—”

“That’s not you talking — it’s him. He’s toxic. I’ve seen the two of you together. He’s poisoning you.”

“He’s not,” said Luz.

“Listen to yourself. Look at you.” He pointed to her crossed arms and her folded legs, her yielding shoulders and drooping head. “You’re all walls, all barricades. Your body’s a prison.”

She uncrossed her arms but had nowhere to put them. “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.” He retrieved a pouch drooping with dried, dark roots. “Here.” She added a nub to the one gone pulpy in her mouth.

“I’ve never been with you,” she said, “on a dowsing. I’d like to see that.”

“I’m going to touch you,” he said.

“Wait, Levi. Please. Will you take me with you one day?”

He kept touching her. “Don’t you want to get back to where we were?”

Luz wanted to get back there, she did, even if she didn’t know where it was. But wherever it was, Ray would not be there. She looked to Ig.

“Let her be,” said Levi.

As if to counter, Ig yanked Levi’s blanket from his roll and nearly toppled the cot. “No, Ig,” said Luz. “Stop.”

Ig began to cry.

“She’s too hot in here,” said Luz, pushing Levi’s hands away. “She didn’t get a nap.”

Luz tried to comfort Ig. The child’s face was flame-red and slick as the flesh of some lost fruit. The tantrum continued, frenzy and agitation rippling like waves through the baby’s whole body. She flailed, would have flung herself atop the scorched stones had Luz not restrained her. “Shhh,” Luz tried. She didn’t know what the fuck she was doing and never had.

Levi peeled a tendril of root from the pouch. “Give her this.”

Ig screamed on. Luz hesitated to take Levi’s offering and hated that she did. She could not seem to escape herself — Ray’s return was proof of that.

She took the root and presented it to Ig. Miraculously, Ig paused in her rage, accepted the root and, as with everything, inserted it into her mouth. “Good girl,” said Levi, his hands on Luz again, making promises.

Soon Ig was suckling quiet and wide-eyed on the cot—“That’s her mind’s knot untying,” Levi said. “Perfectly natural.”

Luz let Levi undress her, then slid atop him.

After, heat-sick and dizzy, she said, “You’ll take me with you? I want to see you work.”

Levi sighed. “Not now, Luz.”

“Please,” she said. “I need to see for myself.”

Levi handed her the pouch of root. “Do you hear yourself?” he said. “You have doubt pouring off you. I can’t bring you. I can’t have you contaminating the process.”

Luz lifted Ig, spaced-out and silent, from the cot.

“I need peace now,” Levi said, and Luz showed herself out.

—

Jimmer rebuilt his cathedral canyon for Ray, there on the high white slopes of the dune sea, recasting each statue and sculpture, repainting each mural, rearranging each altar, reigniting each candle. Ray listened and watched the luminous dome below. Shapes moved inside, inky against the light. Ray did not allow himself to speculate on who the shapes might be. But then Luz emerged from the dome, Ig limp on her hip.

Jimmer stopped talking. He’d seen Luz too and with his silence sanctified Ray’s dejection. Jimmer did not need to say what he said next. It was a fact both men knew and both would have preferred not to have aloud and airborne between them, for they also knew that for all the glee and speed and colossal fun of the day, this would be what they remembered, what it all led to, the utterance undoing all else, the tug of the first thread. The knowledge would make Ray lie when Jimmer descended back down to the colony, make him say he only wanted to enjoy the quiet a little longer. It would keep Ray up in the dune that night. But like Ray, Jimmer had his little one on his mind, his cathedral and his son. He was brimming with everything still unsaid, of and to the child who was no longer. He wanted to say his name, which was the name of the grandfather who’d taken no interest in the boy. Jimmer felt the boy’s arm too yielding where Jimmer yanked it, his freckled shoulder abandoning its socket. Jimmer touched his own tongue to the boy’s gummy red pit, a tooth yanked free too soon. He felt all things going, and though it was obvious and unnecessary and too late, he told Ray, “Son, you’re not safe here.”

Luz had chewed the whole sack of brute root and the flames were diamonds and triangles, arrows of light with pretty blue lozenges inside them. People spoke to her and she watched their faces go cubist, the features tectonic and akimbo. She walked. Bikes were sculpture in the new high country, thanks to impeding boulders and sandy sagebrush haystacks, and for a long time she stared at a pile of them, dancing. Jimmer’s teepee sprouted skyward like a beanstalk, and had she a little more energy she would have climbed it to heaven. She made a note to do that, if need be. Cody’s vans had little constellations of condensation in the corners of their windows, which were eyes wide open to all the alchemy in the world, which even Ray could not smash. She believed in something, would leap over the maybe-Sierras, smiling up at and down on her with their jack-o’-lantern teeth. She could feel ideas as they were conceived in her mind, shooting-star neuron kites with strings grazing her gray matter — a tingle breezing from one side of her skull to the other. She felt this epiphany — that ideas were physical and an attuned person could feel them — the way others felt a sneeze coming on. Which was to say there were all different ways of listening. She heard her brain whispering to her eyes, convincing them anew of such concepts as color and light. She was very still for a very long time. She was inside her own heart, kneeling in a soupy chamber, going at the wall with a ball-peen hammer. She’d cracked a hole there, in the wall between the intellectual and the sensual, and so her thoughts were sensations. She tracked a tremor of relief as it surfed a deep layer of her dermis. She could hear different parts of her going through their involuntary, invisible procedures. They were worker bees or drones, and baked, she remembered, like Dallas had said, the inside of you is baked. Her organs had been tanning, they were leathery or peeling or charred and miserly, and still valves were opening and closing, rings of muscles cinched and uncinched, flaps of skin fluttered to a silent close, and an impossible number of little fingers were waving in some acid bath, saying, Onward! Onward! Onward! Go! Go! Go! She said, Ig, Ig, Ig, but no one answered. Somewhere someone laughed and the laughter turned to smoke, which lifted skyward and made a message there, an unreadable message whose gist she was almost able to grasp. The very dust on her skin was alive, its mites crawling all over her, and if she could only be still enough she herself would be the ecosystem. It might have been one night, or three. Someone brought her a red ovary to eat and she held it in her two hands until she forgot about it but then it hatched and birthed warm liquid and in it swam smiling larvae and these belonged on her in the ecosystem of her body and so she smeared them upon herself and walked into the dune and dug a burrow where she would wait and see all those wondrous creatures for herself, see them hatch across her.

This is where they found her. This is where they said her name.

But their words were not words until the words were, “Ig is hurt.”

“What?”

“They think she was bitten by something.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“She’s with Jimmer.”

—

Ig’s body told the story: one whole side of her swollen to bursting and black, her left arm bloated and prosthetic-looking, unable to bend, her neck swallowed, her eye sockets screaming red seams between two bulbs of waxy flesh. Ray was with her, and Jimmer too. Ray held a peeled stick in her mouth. “It holds her tongue down.” He showed Luz where it was worst: the red-ringed punctures in the baby’s blood-glutted head and in both hands, yeasty like over-risen dough, the digits all but indistinguishable.

“Jimmer says tarantula wasps. Or vinegaroons. She can’t eat yet, so we can’t tell whether it’s affected her sense of taste. She probably walked into a nest. You can see that some got caught in her hair. They would sting her head and she’d reach up to stop them and then they’d sting the tips of her fingers. She couldn’t understand what it was and no one was there. They would sting her and she’d reach up again. This happened over and over until she passed out. One of the girls found her this morning. Took us two hours just to get the stingers out. No one could find you.”

“Keep pressing,” Jimmer told Ray. “Her tongue’s as big as a fist.” The baby’s throttled breathing was unbearable, only worse those moments it stopped.

“Keep her awake,” Jimmer told Ray.

Luz said, “What can I do? Tell me what to do.”

No one answered. Ray began to cry, quietly, the only other sound Jimmer grinding a stone between two others until it was green dust. This he mixed with water in a gourd to make a mud. He began coating Ig’s distended body in this. “Bentonite clay,” he told Ray. “Draws the poison out. Wish I had aloe but this will have to do.”

“Thank you,” Luz said. “I don’t deserve your help.”

“I am not helping you,” Jimmer said. He handed the gourd to Ray and instructed him to continue smearing Ig. To Luz he said, “Come with me.”

Outside, clouds were snagged on the teeth of the maybe-Sierras, dropping rain that evaporated before it hit the ground. Jimmer said, “Luz, we all have an obligation to the people who love us. They’ve given us this gift whether we want it or not and it is our duty to stand up and be worthy. We are not loved in proportion to our deserving, and thank God for that, for unworthies like you and me would find that life a bitch. We’re loved to the level we ought to rise, and even in returning it we are obligated to be gentle. Do you understand me? You chose her; she didn’t choose you. She came into this world unawares and not knowing better than to love full-blast. You seem to be doing your best to teach her what a mistake that is. Is that what you’re after? To make sure this little one knows what a dreadful business love can be? You’re learning that yourself, and so you think you might give her lessons while you’re at it, is that right?”

“No.”

“No. Because you aren’t even thinking about her. That would involve too much foresight and consideration on your part. That would imply a plan and some sitting and thinking about what would be best for someone other than Luz, and you haven’t ever done that, have you? Now, I’ve made mistakes. I’ve lost people. But you’ve thrown them away. There is an important difference. You’re waiting for someone to come scoop you up. Well, you want to know who comes along and does the scooping? Scavengers. You’re busted up, anyone can see that. But tell me why you’ve got to bust up this little one, too. Are you lonely? You want a companion down there, in the sinkhole you’ve become? Shame on you.”

Luz touched her pocket absently.

Jimmer ripped her hand away. “You want more? Go get more — chew yourself into oblivion!”

“No—”

“Go on — I mean it! Bon voyage!”

“I don’t want it.”

“And when you go, don’t come back. Not for Ig and not for anyone. Kill yourself quick instead of slow, and save us all the hurt.”

“I don’t want it,” Luz told him and told herself.

But she did want it, wanted it badly, wanted it even more in the following days, when she was not to go back to Ig. She was not helpful, according to Jimmer, or rather she would be tremendously helpful if she would just stay the fuck away. Her waking hours yawned before her without Ig to suck them up, and without the root, each day was a greenhouse for worry. But she did not seek out more. She read Sacajawea’s birth of Little Pomp and John Muir’s campaign for Yosemite until her eyes gave in to headache, until tremors began in her bowels and shuddered outward from there. Soon, her only project was making it outside to evacuate in a timely manner and back in again. Each of the four stairs rising into the Blue Bird took on its own personality, presented its unique challenges — the staggering height of the first, the tricky wedge of the third. She vomited everything she had in her and otherwise emptied herself, first in privacy and then, when she could not make it to privacy, out in the open. People gawked, but Luz did not notice them. In this way word spread that Luz was sick. One day Dallas came, and another Ray, each bringing water and news of Ig’s progress. The second time Ray came he stayed, insisting on placing a bucket beside Luz and tending to her.

Cramps turned her inside out and, forgetting, she asked where all the pain was coming from. “You’ve been chewing a tranquilizer,” Ray said. “You’re going through withdrawal.”

Eventually, Luz spoke only to moan apologies. “I was supposed to be better than her people, but I’m not,” she said. “Not… not… not.” Her wet head in Ray’s lap was his forgiveness.

When Jimmer came, Ray asked after Ig.

“Sleeping,” Jimmer said. “Dallas is with her. You’re welcome to go see for yourself. The little one would like that.”

“I’m needed here,” Ray said, an unconvincing line from a badly written play. The truth was that anything that came out of Luz was easier than Ig’s pleading eyes, pinched between the featureless venom-fat pustules of her face, asking, Why are you hurting me?

Jimmer allowed Ray his dishonesty. Intervention was a young man’s game, and he’d already exhausted himself with Luz, the wretch. “How’s she doing?”

“She comes in and out,” Ray said. He touched her dank brow. “She keeps forgetting where she is. She’s always shivering.”

Jimmer felt Luz’s wrist, then put his head near hers and listened. He placed a bundle of sticks in a shell, lit it, and wafted the smoke toward Luz, who was no longer with them but off in an arctic tube where a sourceless echo said, You are supposed to be here, and, What does that mean, babygirl, to set a bunch of uranium free?

At dusk, Jimmer returned, empty-handed. Luz was caught in some demonic REM cycle — catatonic as a corpse, then suddenly her yellow-edged eyes open but unseeing, still watching whatever scenes played out in her mind. Each time she awoke Ray gave her water and she took it, briefly, before collapsing again. Ray told Jimmer this. And also that if he lost Luz he’d lose everything.

“If she makes it through the night she’ll come out,” Jimmer said.

“You’re sure?” asked Ray.

“Let’s get her through the night.” There was something Jimmer was not saying, but Ray could not bring himself to demand it.

And so the two of them sat quietly for some time. Jimmer grew angry at the approaching mountains and all the sorrow they brought, while Ray found himself inclined to pray. He was rusty at it, his prayers not his own but borrowed from the boys in the desert, recycled entreaties once offered to him, god of chemical reprieve. They went, Just let everything be okay, could you? I’m hurting here. Isn’t there something you can do for me? There’s got to be something you can do for me. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat — I’ve got fear like you get the shits. It comes for me in the night, a black thing. It curls around my head. Mine are little winged demons, a cloud of them. I see them everywhere. Don’t you have some way to make them leave? I only want my old self back. I can’t remember what it was like not to hurt.

Suddenly, light invaded the rear of the bus, a riot of dust tumbling in. Ray stayed where he was, Luz’s head heavy in his lap. He would not stop touching her, not now and not ever.

Though Ray did not look up, he knew Levi’s easy walk, the splay of his thick hands, his hard gourd of a torso. Levi approached Ray where he sat with Luz. Ray kept his gaze down, on Levi’s right foot, where his two smallest toes should have been, where a knob of jaundiced skin twitched instead. The dowser spoke to Jimmer only. “This is not a good idea.”

Jimmer said nothing.

“Stop this, Jimmer. It’s fucking nonsense.”

Just then, Luz woke with one of her desperate gasps. Ray held her, whispered her all kinds of prayers. To the others he said, “She’s nearly through the worst of it, I think.”

The dowser said, “What the hell do you know about it?”

“I’ve been here with her.”

“So I’ve heard. She could die. Did you know that?”

Ray looked up to Jimmer. “Is that true?”

“I don’t know,” Jimmer admitted.

Levi squatted down beside Ray. “It’s true,” he said tenderly. He took some root from his pouch. “She needs this.”

Luz, only half there, would surely take anything anyone gave her.

“No,” said Ray. “You can’t do that.”

“I have to,” said Levi. “You’ll kill her.”

Ray said, “Jimmer, tell him he can’t do this. She’s come too far for this.”

“He might be right,” Jimmer said. “No one has ever stopped cold.”

“No,” said Ray, hunching over his girl. He said this many times.

Levi put a large, soft hand on Ray’s shoulder. “Her death will be on you. I’m not sure you’re grasping that.”

Ray shrugged his hand off. “On me? How do you figure that, friend? You’re the one force-feeding her that shit.”

Again, Jimmer said, “No one has ever stopped.”

Then, from the dusty halo churning at the rear of the bus, someone said, “I stopped.”

“Dal,” Jimmer said.

It was Dallas, Ig in her arms, a lumpy puppet.

“When?” Levi demanded.

“After,” she said, an aquifer of understanding between them.

Levi opened his mouth. But then, as if absorbing the blast wave of these two syllables, he lost his balance, tumbled out of his squat beside Ray and onto his rump on the floor of the bus. Somehow, he was still all coiled potential there. He might have sprung up in rage and embarrassment, might have shaken Dallas, might have hit her, hit Ig, might have shrieked in her face all his injured rage until the sound itself forced her out, and Ig too. They waited.

Finally, Levi said quietly, “You didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t know I had to,” said Dallas.

Then, Luz spoke. She was asking for Ig. She sat up and reached for the girl. Dallas paused, but laid Ig in her mother’s lap. Luz took Ig — swollen Ig and poisoned Ig and ruined Ig — and held her.

Levi kneeled beside them. “Luz, you need to take this nib. You’re sick. You could die. Just chew a little.”

Ray whispered, “Don’t, Luz.”

Luz did not look at either of them. She kissed Ig, then muttered something into the baby’s lumpy dome. The baby began to cry, a cry crimped by her injuries. Dallas went to take her again but Luz looked up, pleading for more time.

Levi raised the purplish strip of root. “Just a little bit, my girl, just to get you through.”

Luz spoke again, louder. “Leave us alone.”

Levi said, “Luz, you—”

“Please. Everyone. Leave us alone.”

No one moved until Dallas said, “Let’s go.”

They went.

—

Hanging high above the colony, the crests of the dunes were wind-smudged, but the air outside the bus was funeral-still. Levi turned to Dallas. “You’ve always been willful.”

“Fuck off,” said Dallas before she left. “I love you, but you have got to fuck off.”

Jimmer glanced at Levi, then told Ray, “Keep her hydrated. And bring that little one back to me when you can.” He went after Dallas.

Ray expected Levi to leave, too — hoped he would. But Levi stayed, watching Dallas and Jimmer until they disappeared, Jimmer’s hand on Dallas’s back.

Levi rubbed his bare head. “Are they… together?” Apparently he expected an answer.

“Jimmer and Dal?” said Ray. “I don’t know, man. I’m out of the loop.”

Levi sighed, looked up at the dune sea, then gathered up his robe and began to piss. He was ample all the way down, Ray noticed.

“The women in my life are turning on me,” Levi said. “Everything I do, I do for them. I think about them day and night. Everything I’ve done has been to make them comfortable. I worry for them. I take care of them. Every single thing I do is for them and they don’t even see me anymore.” He gave his penis a mournful shake, dropped his robe, and looked at Ray. “I can’t even trust Dallas anymore. I’ve lost her. She’s another person. The things I’ve done, to keep them comfortable…” He exhaled again and looked past Ray, to the looming toothy range. “Things are changing all around me. ‘Force-feeding.’ Did Luz say that?”

“I—”

“I know she didn’t say that. I’ve never forced anyone to do anything in my life.”

“How about your little harem here?”

“Harem?”

Ray touched the notch of scar at his brow. “That’s why you did this to me out there. Because I’m not useful to you.”

Levi shook this off. “The dune curates. Some are called here—”

“Cut the bullshit, man. I’m a threat to you.”

Levi pinched one broad brow between his fingers, then the other, as though trying to wring the irritation from them. “Do you have any idea what it would take to threaten me? That’s not rhetorical. I sincerely want to know. Because I’ve never felt threatened or otherwise afraid of anyone in my entire life and I am curious about that sensation.”

“You attacked me because I wasn’t useful to you. Because you weren’t interested in fucking me.”

“No.” Levi smiled, a sick crescent in the leaving light. “That we did for fun.”

Levi turned and raised his arms to the colony around him. “The whole natural world is arrayed against you, Ray. I can hear it. There is a certain order of things here — everywhere, really. You’ll fit in somewhere, but not here. Surely you’ve felt that.”

Ray had.

“Luz belongs here,” Levi said. “Dallas and Jimmer belong here. Estrella, too.”

An involuntary spasm of disgust crossed Ray’s face — a gift for the dowser. Levi accepted it. “Yes, I know about Estrella. I know everything.”

Ray turned to reenter the Blue Bird. “Don’t call her that.”

“You know,” said Levi, “I could find those people — Estrella’s people.” Whimsy and titillation picked up speed inside him, as if this were a spontaneous road trip he was planning. “I could find them in a day! Why don’t I bring them here and we can see what they think of you?”

“Bring them here?” Ray scoffed. “Go ahead! Call on them. Make a day of it. Let me give you their address. Oh, damn, I don’t have it on me. But you know what? I think they’re in the phone book.”

Levi’s amusement was almost perceptible, a living breathing thing. “Funny,” he said. “I know where I am. Do you know where you are?”

Luz found the rootless world hot and lacking, scooped out, herself a bored husk blowing through. In her beige sobriety she clung to the idea of Ig, whose reported recuperation was the only gift life had left her. They were hardly alone together, for the sake of both their healing, so she tried to get by on conjuring the child’s oddness and affection. But when Dallas or Jimmer brought Ig for a visit, the child was staggeringly hurtful, enjoying nothing more than dropping something, having Luz pick it up, and then dropping it again. Worse, the baby was in a Ray phase these days, putting her sourness on the shelf only when he was near.

With her newly clear head, Luz was free to feel acutely this injury and all the others she’d postponed with the root. She felt all the time. There seemed no intermission to her new stirrings — the guilt and shame and self-loathing were physical, concrete burdens, and heavy. Boredom flopped on her chest. Regret sagged in her gut. The daisy chain of Ig’s scars was a yoke she dragged from her neck. On her own and too awake, Luz recalled the corridor of her withdrawal, the arctic tube, the passageway in which she’d been trapped for such a long time. She’d come upon objects there: the scarf with its rusty stain, the bonfire circle of mostly women, mostly young, mostly pretty. She had come upon some artifacts and not come upon others. No rainbow chuckwallas or blue chupacabras in the corridor, and all the trees were wither-rooted and dead. Evidence in the corridor, breadcrumbs of reason: Jimmer the healer, Cody the grower, Nico the mechanic and the muscle.

Objects and artifacts and evidence and epiphanies: No one’s name was their name. Everyone here was running from something.

She managed to gain weight, thanks to Cody, who came in to make sure she always had something to eat. Luz watched him warily on these deliveries. She’d thought him an errand boy at best, but saw now that Cody was smarter than he pretended to be. One day, remembering a ruby-red orb hovering like a chandelier in her withdrawal corridor, she said, “Can I ask you something?”

Cody said, “Will it stop you always eyeballing me?”

“It might.”

“So ask.”

“Where did that grapefruit come from?”

“What?”

“When I first came here, I had a grapefruit.”

“You didn’t have no grapefruit.”

“I did. Dallas brought it to me. We ate it with Ig.”

“You might have imagined it. I still dream of dairy.”

“You don’t grow grapefruits in the vans, Cody.”

He silently conceded.

“You don’t have citrus trees.”

“No, ma’am.”

“So where did it come from?”

He rubbed his tight mouth. “That’s one of those questions you’re better off not asking.”

“I need to know,” she said.

Cody looked at her, somber and a little angry. “Levi wanted you to have it. He really cares about you, you know.”

“Where did he get it?”

The kid said nothing.

“What’s he doing out there, Cody?”

That secret intelligence flashed in his eyes. “That’s another one of them questions,” he said.

And that was how the last of her whole lush and infinite miracle world dissolved, finally, leaving behind only its brutal scaffolding: sun of suns, drought of droughts, no rain, no rivers, an impossible pile of sand approaching an unforgiving range. Barren and bereft and lifeless, just like the pamphlets said. Leave or die. No more complicated than that. No other dimension, no buried menagerie and no trick of the eye or ear or heart could make it otherwise.

When Ray visited later that day, he visited a dingy solar-powered school bus in a madman’s colony, an outpost in the cruel tradition of outposts, peopled by prostitutes and loners and rejects and criminals and liars, their sheriff a con and a thief and surely worse.

Luz felt this disillusionment severely, with no root to blur its edges.

She stroked Ray’s temples. “Do you miss your heartcolors?”

“More like I thought you would. I was afraid you’d be disappointed. I don’t have any desert visions after all.”

“Me neither,” Luz admitted. “I wanted to, but I don’t.”

She took Ray’s hand as though it were an egg. “You were right,” she said, “about Levi. About the primer. There aren’t any new animals out there. No spontaneous rivers or wandering trees. Probably no warheads pointed at us, no Operation Glassjaw. I wanted there to be — I wanted to be important. I wanted all day, every day, especially with you gone. Especially for Ig. But there isn’t. There just isn’t.”

Ray looked at her in their old way, the trembling swell that meant all the ways and reasons he loved her were at that instant rising in him. They kissed: horse and wagon and a new wondrous not knowing which was which, another swell, a swan dive, a splash of warmth from her flush cheeks to her throat and to the filling pools of her eyes. She pulled him to her, guided him into her, present, untentative, nothing abstract about it. Luz kept her eyes open, whispered, “It’s you, is it you?” Ray said, “It is,” more certain than he had been in a long time. Neither came, nor pretended to. They simply uncoupled after a time and lay together, wet with each other’s sweat.

Luz said, “Stay here, next to me.” He did, though he was somewhere else, too. “What is it, Ray?”

“Nothing. I can’t say. Nothing.”

“You can. It’s us. Only us.”

Ray put his hand in her hair. He kissed her forehead and saw that she was right.

“I just… I don’t know how to say this. I just have this feeling like she knows…”

“Who knows?”

“We shouldn’t have done it, Luz. We shouldn’t have taken her.” In his mind, beneath the shame of his approaching confession and the relief it promised, he marveled at all the ways he was still capable of letting Luz down. But he went on. He said, “I’m afraid of her, I think. Of Ig. There’s something… odd about her.”

He imagined her disappointment would be an audible thing, barely, like the sound of pigeons flying low through an open empty promenade, the hiss of sea foam dying at high tide, the scrapes of Sal’s carving tools against ancient soapstone, the rasp of salty bleached sand beneath a board strapped to a healer’s feet. He closed his eyes and waited for Luz to give up on him. This newly awakened Luz, her severe eyes always threatening to cry, could retreat into herself whenever she wanted.

But she did not retreat. “I know,” she said. “I’ve seen it. We’ll go. It will be better when we go. We’ll get her someplace stable.”

Ray nodded. “Someplace with walls and water.”

“Water walls.”

“Waterfalls.”

“Rainbows in the mist.”

“Misty mornings.”

“Misty mountains.”

“Mountain streams.”

“Marshes.”

“Creeks and eddies.”

“Rivers and inlets.”

“Lagoons.”

“New moons.”

“No sand.”

“No sand.”

“Estuaries.”

“Where, Ray?”

“What about Wisconsin?”

“Yes. Yes, Wisconsin.”

“You have to tell him.”

The ripple took the colony to a road, and that road led them to a ghostly horseshoe of crumbling whitewashed adobe. At the center of the square stood three dead salt cedars, their trunks and low-hanging limbs papered in playbills bleached to blank, except the buried layers, which read NOW PLAYING AT MARLA BENOIT’S AMARGOSA OPERA HOUSE.

The lock on the entrance had been popped off. In the lightless lobby of the theater Luz opened a door marked MADEMOISELLES, thinking that to use a toilet might be nice, before she got on with this unpleasantness. But it seemed a bag of dry cement had exploded inside the ladies’ room. Shards of mirror rivered the floor. The far wall yawned where a sink had been. The toilet lay on its side, cracked in half. Similar scene in the men’s room, so she went back outside to squat.

In the theater itself it was very dark, and she had to stand for some time before her sun-clenched eyes accepted the rows of red velvet seats crusted with dust, veins of wires overhead reaching for a long-gone chandelier and Levi sitting on the apron of the bare stage. The curtain crumpled behind him, fallen its final fall. A toothless organ waited in the wing at stage left. Luz did not feel afraid, as she’d thought she might.

Levi said, “I remember this place. I saw a documentary about it in school. Marla Benoit moved here from Paris, married a miner. They were on their way to Goldfield and got a flat tire here. He got a job in the talc mines. She convinced the Borax Works to build her an opera house. People came to see her, later, but for a long time she danced alone every night. She painted herself an audience so she’d always sell out.”

He nodded to the close, filthy walls. It was true, an audience had been painted there and remained beneath the grime, crowded into boxes and balconies, aficionados in their finery, pearly opera glasses resting on the breasts of the ladies, some teeth still relatively bright. A bishop, captured in midwhisper, leaning in to another clergyman who would never hear the secret opinion of his holiness, his snide disapproval or breathless admiration. A madame with a starched ruff and a cat on her lap, both cat and mistress ever alert to the production at hand, the cat’s tail ever curled in contentment. In the rear balcony sat a king and queen, eternal patrons, never to age or philander or remove their pale hands from the arms of their chairs. A swarthy gentleman in emerald bloomers, leading a lace-shrouded señora by the hand. Running late perhaps, as they always were, but now forever stranded in the entryway without any usher to soothe their embarrassment. (“Forgive our Luz,” her agent said into her earpiece, “she was on island time.”) The Spanish couple’s late arrival surely disturbed two milk-skinned women, their paper fans paused. Behind them a man with a sly thin mustache, a playbill in his hand, eternally considering whether to adjust the gold chain of one maid’s necklace, never to determine whether she would be scandalized by the flirtation or welcome it. A juggler from the Orient, pins aloft, his bare chest gleaming with effort. A lone lord in a cobalt vest, his hand to his beard, ignoring the elderly noblewomen murmuring at his elbow. His eyes closed, he listens — only listens — to the sighs of the stage below, made of pine hauled from Illinois by twenty-mule team, to the creaks of the chairs upholstered in devoré velvet sailed from New York to San Francisco around the finger of Patagonia, then sewed by Marla Benoit, by lamplight, she herself listening for the return of her whiskey-sick husband or word of a mine collapse, never uncertain which she might prefer. Eyes closed, the listening lord hears the tinny kiss of the prima ballerina assoluta’s needle to its primitive thimble, both procured by trade from a Shoshone weaving woman. He hears Marla Benoit load mesquite into the woodstove in winter, the antelope-leather soles of her pointe shoes whispering across the stage in rehearsal, her ravenous moaning from beneath the petite president of the Borax Works. Then, he hears nothing for a very long time, save for a family of kangaroo rats nesting in the walls, Mojav looters disemboweling the building of its copper pipes and chandelier, an overheated Bureau of Conservation survey team and then, finally, the boyhood memories of a cuckolded dowser.

“She was mad, probably,” said Levi. “The documentary had one recording of her performance and in it she played a doll — a jewelry box ballerina, and I thought she was one come to life. Freaky makeup and these jerky movements. It scared the hell out of me. I wonder what happened to her.”

How sad he was, all of a sudden, how hunched and timid, how he leaned on his own idea of himself. The theatergoers all saw it, through their pearl-embellished binoculars or with their own unaided eyes. The gossiping priest and the decorous king and queen, the busty ladies and their randy suitor, the tardy couple from far away, even the Oriental juggler saw it, distracted as he was — even the listening lord with his eyes closed. How could Luz have missed it?

“I need to tell you something,” she said. Luz approached the apron and sat beside a coffee can footlight. “It’s Ray and me. I wanted you to know that. It’s not that I don’t care about you…”

“I get it,” said Levi, his hand waving languid in the musty air. “You love me but you love him more. It’s all so damn adult.”

“Yes,” she allowed. “I do care about you, deeply—”

A beaky scrape came from the rear of the theater as its doors were pried wide open. Some colony scavengers wandered in, seeking shade. Luz watched them and they her. She would have liked Ray to be there with her, but he was unwelcome just about everywhere now.

“You care about me,” Levi prompted. “Deeply.”

Luz dropped her voice. “Yes. And there’s — there’s something else.”

More people filed into the unlit theater. Luz looked to Levi to dismiss them, but he waved them down the aisle. Dallas and Cass were among them. Nico, too. “Have a seat,” Levi said. “Welcome to dress rehearsals at the Lovelorn Theater. Luz was just practicing her heartbreaker monologue. You were right,” he told her. “You’re not very good at this. Very wooden, if I may offer a note.”

Luz looked at her lap. “Should we talk later?” she whispered.

“Why? We have no secrets here. Come,” he called to the people in the back. “Plenty of room up front. Up,” he said to Luz. He popped up, some mystic vim animating him all of a sudden. “Stand up! You’re collapsing your diaphragm. Up, up!”

Luz stood. There were more people in the audience than she thought.

Levi waited until their velvet-covered chairs stopped creaking. “Now, again, with the whole body. Take it from, ‘There’s something else.’”

“There’s something else,” Luz said, a reflex. “I–I can’t go through with it. The plan. I can’t make her into a symbol. I thought I could — I wanted to be able to — but I can’t.”

“She can’t!” he called to the back wall.

“I have to think about what’s best for Ig,” she whispered.

“What’s that? You must project.”

“Levi,” she said, reaching for him.

“Never turn your back to the audience,” he said, pointing her shoulders forward. “Very basic.”

Luz hesitated.

“Go on,” he said. “The show must go on.”

She said nothing.

Levi said, “This affects all of them. They have a right to hear you say it. Just as I do.”

“I have to think about what’s best for Ig,” she said.

“What’s best for her.” He smiled. “The plan is what’s best for her.” The others nodded. “What’s best for us is best for her.”

“It’s just — all the exposure, Levi. It scares me.”

Levi took her face and held it. “Of course it does, Luz. Everything worth doing is done in the shadow of death.”

Someone moaned in assent.

“But I’ll be right beside you,” he said, squeezing. “‘Do not fear, for I am with you.’ ‘I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.’”

Luz had heard these lines before. “‘What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.’”

He flung her free. “Exactly! Think about what brought you here, about all that was sacrificed so you would come to this place at this moment!”

Luz did. She saw Ray’s flat feet carrying him down the road, his prophet eyes watering above the cobalt scarf, the bloated bighorn floating in that golden pool of poison. She saw her mother submerged beneath gray waves at Point Dume, her pretty dress aswirl in the current. Perhaps it had all been arranged with a purpose in mind. Perhaps the prairie dog had marched through the starlet’s front door intending to be their chaperone and spirit guide. She wanted to believe in these things still. To believe in cause and purpose.

“Levi,” Luz said, “she’s my daughter.” She had never called Ig this, and hoped it did not sound so false as it felt.

“Your daughter?” Levi wheeled away, bewildered. “She belongs to all of us.”

The crowd agreed.

“She is a child of the dune sea!”

Luz stood still while the crowd erupted. This seemed somehow her stage direction. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I won’t allow it.”

The two were silent for a moment, then Levi stepped downstage. “Here is where I ask what happened to you. When did you become so possessive? Were you always this way? Was I blind to it? Have I led us down a wayward path?”

No, said the crowd. No.

“You used to be so…” He sighed. “Open.”

“No I didn’t,” she said. “I never was.”

She wanted him to be right, even still. She wanted to be the person he once mistook her for: open and purposeful all at once. But she was meager, shut. That was, after all this supposed transformation, all this movement and light, her rotten way.

“Levi, even if we did it, it wouldn’t work.” The crowd mumbled its disagreement. “It won’t,” Luz said to them. “The range will be on us any day now. You all know that. No video will stop that. No campaign. No one will care about me — a Mojav — a kidnapper. It won’t stop anything.” She turned back to Levi. “You found me and Ig. You know that no one else was coming for us. No one cares about Baby Dunn.”

“Did I ever tell you how we found you?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “the bighorn.”

“You were all but dead. Dehydrated, hyperthermic, full-blown sunstroke. Completely unresponsive. But Ig? Ig was wide awake. Conscious. Alert. Calm. She was taking everything in. Watching you go. She was at home there, witnessing.”

Luz shook her head.

“You see?” he asked his audience. “You see how clarity can melt into suspicion? Without mindfulness? Without vigilance? You used to be among us, Luz. You were once with us, of us.” He was using her name but no longer addressing her. “But something has contaminated you. Some vexation, some poisonous, nihilistic seed. I’ve seen all this, in the sweat lodge and beyond. So clearly. The range, your withdrawal into the self, allowing harm to befall our Ig. They’re all connected.”

The crowd sat rapt.

“My loves, there are contaminants among us. We have allowed negativity to propagate, a toxic yeast rising in our midst, and we have done nothing. I count myself among the complacent. But no more! The time has come to purge ourselves of these toxicities, cleanse our community of doubt, hesitation, misgiving, skepticism. Reinvigorate our cause from within and without!”

Yes! many said.

“We all want to know, ‘What next?’ First let us purify our intent. Reinvigorate our purpose. Each of us must rid our spirits of their innermost burdens and transgressions. We must expel the poison from our singular body. Do this and the path will be made plain. Do this and we will endure. We will thrive. Forever and ever. We will meet this range and meet our fate there!”

Luz tried to flee, but there were only walls at the wings. She turned around and tried to find an opening in the curtain behind her. Feeling their eyes on her, hearing their snickers and jeers, she clawed at the velvet. She could not find the opening. Finally she turned, faced them, stepped off the apron and pushed herself up the aisle and out the open door.

Patient had always wondered what it felt like — says all men wonder. Considers occasional homicidal impulses “fundamental component of masculine socialization.” Says his companion [alias “Nico”] had done it — in the war — and Nico knew patient had not — says “I knew what he thought of me.” Predominant motivation for initial attack was curiosity, he says — specifically regarding the physical sensation—“new sensory data interested me.” Ask what kind of data: “in this case crushing a skull, I suppose.” Patient didn’t know potential victim at time — saw “only a Mojav”—“an empty bladder I had no interest in filling.” Attributes outburst partly to environment — notes that “the desert at night has no restraints.” Patient admits wanting to kill there — thought he in fact had, for a time. Ask what he remembers from attack itself: “the give of the spade”—borrowed from another community member — says his immediate thought was “must remember to return this to him.” Patient describes lack of profound metamorphosis — disappointed by this, initially — but says soon realized that disappointment in itself was surprising — asks when was the last time I had been truly surprised by my life. Patient also recalls hand tingling — says he was relieved—“one less thing I had to worry about.” Ask what else he worried about: other group members—“they wanted all I had.” Patient says person in his position must never underestimate anyone — says other men “thought they could do what I did.” Ask what: patient ignores — says he was “holding them off” but efforts had a “cost”—says everything does. Ask what cost: patient ignores. Ask if he means former lover, “Dallas”—was she motivation for arson incident, later? Patient denies this — says he didn’t do it for her — not initial attack and not arson incident. Admits he told Dallas fire was part of larger plan — but plan did not occur to him until after fire — when she inquired about his motives. Says dune sea “offered the solution” at that time — patient “only had to listen.” Ask why “solution” resonated with him: it would “solve everything” and “give [Dallas] something the old man couldn’t”—admits to arson but maintains he had no larger plan—“I was hurting”—says women at camp were “losing their goddamn minds.” Ask if he means Dallas or “Luz”: both—“also Ray.” Says “everything I hated most in the world was in there”—“all my troubles inside, copulating”—patient says he hated bus itself — the vehicle — from before, when he and Dallas had resided there—“before I was called away.” Ask what called him away — stillborn? Patient denies — says he understood Dallas’s need for space — compares to Luz’s termination of affair — considers Luz cruel, selfish—“piecemeal and secretive”—“vindictive back and forth.” Says she “took more” from him. Ask what she took, his plan, the child “Ig”? Patient says question is too literal. Says we’ve been over this — expresses frustration — says he was lost—“completely alone”—“rejected by two women I loved deeply”—forced to watch them with other men—“my own people”—says he began to fear for his status in community — describes other men in group as “power-thirsty”—was around this time he began to fear dune sea. Ask what he feared: expressed frustration—“I’ve told you all this”—wondered if dune had “betrayed” him — says others said it had. Ask if this motivated arson, subsequent violence? Patient denies — reiterates he had no plan at time of arson—“except taking a two-by-four from the bonfire and holding it beneath the snout of the bus until the fire took in the chassis”—says he had had visions of “the monster box of the bus wrapped in fire”—“a burp of flame when [the fire] found a sludge of fuel in the bottom of the old gas tank.” Patient says he is tired of repeating himself — says he has always been open with me — says he is “not one of those men who pretends he never learned to express his inner world […] because he’s too lazy to deal with his shit”—“I do the work”—says he is “not a cowboy”—says he is sensitive now “and was sensitive then.” Asks why I find bus incident significant — why do I keep coming back to it? — says he knows what I am trying to do — insists arson “had nothing to do with” subsequent incidents—“Nothing to do with what happened to them, later”—says he has been honest with me — says it is my turn to be honest with him—“Why do you keep asking after plans and patterns?”—wants to know why am I convinced acts were premeditated. Ask patient what he thinks: expresses frustration—“classic psycho-bullshit smoke and mirrors”—“the emperor wears no clothes!” Eventually, patient asks if I really want to know what he thinks — says first “they told you to watch out for me”—“I’m brilliant”—“a manipulator.” Then says I have a deeper motivation — says arson was “a crime of passion”—says I need him “incapable of the intensity and nakedness that phrase suggests.” Patient says I am afraid he feels more than I do. Ask like what: “more sensations”—“more deeply”—“more often.” Says I am starting to realize that I am “the one who is incapable of a crime of passion”—says I have never felt true passion — speculates that I “have doubted the very concept of passion” until meeting him — says I am beginning to realize that there are “subterranean emotional spheres” to which I will “never tunnel”—patient says I have “lived grayly”—“rounding out the fat belly of the bell curve”—says I am starting to realize—“truly grasp”—that “in the not too distant future [my] heart will stop its plugging”—it will be “dead inside [me]” and I “have not once used it.” Repeatedly denies premeditation — says he had “no plan but pain”—says he “just wanted them to burn.”

After Levi’s performance at Marla Benoit’s opera house, Dallas and Jimmer took Ig. Dallas’s words, “We’ll take her.” A workaday phrase embedded in consolation and friendship, extended beneath the dead salt cedars, where Dallas found Luz trying not to cry. “This will pass, Luz. Levi’s riled now. He’s hurting. He gets this way. But it’s all coming from a place of love. Believe me. You three will work through this. This will pass. He just needs sleep. You too. We’ll watch Ig for the night. So you can get some rest. We’ll take her.”

A phrase drained of meaning until filled again. Still just a thing people say when Luz and Ray fell asleep that night, curled into each other like the two lake fossils they’d found on a walk in another life up a mountain called Lookout. To consider otherwise would have been to admit their complete and profound aloneness.

The lovers woke with acridity in their lungs, the air replaced with hot black smoke. Ray reached for Luz, assuming her asleep from her stillness, roused her, and together they made their way to the front door. The rubber aisle was melted, scalding their forearms as they crawled. Ray heard but did not feel the sizzle of his palms when he grasped the lever to open the door. It would not give. Struggling for breath, Ray managed to kick the door open. He and Luz tumbled into the cool arms of the desert dawn, coughing.

The whole colony was there, it seemed, and together they watched the Blue Bird go phoenix, aglow in sunset colors, red-orange and throbbing. Inside, Sacajawea, John Muir, Lewis and Clark, William Mulholland, John Wesley Powell. The starlet’s scarf and Ray’s father’s Leatherman. Ig’s bed and tub and play place. The primer.

Not until well after they escaped the bus would it occur to Ray that Luz had not been asleep, inside. Not until the adrenaline left him limp would he think to wonder why she had not reached for him. Not until they poured water down their scorched throats would he wonder why she had not reached at all, nor panicked, nor screamed. Not until after the ash flakes snowed down on them, not until after the explosion that made glass of the sand beneath, the fire flickering on the walls of the opera house, its windows like knowing open eyes. Not until after they had watched the burning bus charred to a carcass would he recall seeing her open eyes, small flames in them. Only then would Ray recall the unmoving body of his love, resigned to die.

DALLAS

Transfixing, the fire. Extraordinary. Even the little one felt it.

THE GIRLS

We watched.

JIMMER

We were more together there than we had been in some time.

DALLAS

Which is what made us see so clearly.

CODY

When you think of it, the trouble started with them, with Luz and then her man.

THE GIRLS

They were poison.

JIMMER

It’s true that certain combinations of individuals can be literally toxic, on a chemical level.

THE GIRLS

We tried to love them, but they were poison.

DALLAS

Except the little one.

THE GIRLS

We made choices — whatever else they were, they were choices.

JIMMER

In a context of such unity, one feels deviation as an agony.

DALLAS

We could sense this man turning on us.

CODY

Ray wanted to hurt Levi, who was us.

JIMMER

You could sense malice rising in him.

DALLAS

He screamed, but he had no voice.

CODY

We found out later his vocal cords were singed.

JIMMER

A soundless scream portends death, almost always.

THE GIRLS

He went for Levi’s throat.

JIMMER

He was after us, too, for we all felt and breathed and lived as one.

THE GIRLS

A beautiful feeling, harmony. It had to be protected.

DALLAS

Nico stepped in.

CODY

Straight dropped him.

THE GIRLS

The rest of us came like gnats to a wet eye.

Ray welcomed the beating. The way he saw it he had all kinds of evil shit inside him and perhaps the blows might knead it out. For example: he hated Ig. He hated the time she’d had with Luz, the things she’d allowed to happen, the days she spent freely tottering about while he was entombed in a talc mine. He hated how open she was with her wants, her bare manipulations, how even her dishonesty was honest. He hated her cruelty, hated how grand it made him feel when she cast Luz aside in favor of him. He hated her for being so fond of him and for, yes, ruining his life. He hated her because it was easier than hating the bereft dust and the dropless clouds, the sun, the night, the Earth and its thin envelope of ruined air. He took the blows in silence. Their hands were his own, trembling as he struggled to give the men their inoculations. The laughing man on the TV, the dowser, Luz in everyone else’s arms. Sal and Sal’s figurines and Sal’s slut mother. His own mother and her cleaning supplies. The wet bits of cork floating in her vintage California chardonnay. Luz. Luz. Luz. Every single thing she did. His quiet hate was light and there was nothing in his life that could not absorb it and reflect it back to him at the same time, nothing that would not beget more, like the joke or legend of which he recalled only the punch line: turtles all the way down. Except Ig. To hate Ig was to stop the spiral of his rage. Her innocence was the boundary, the vessel, for to hate her was to hate himself, to allow all the blackness inside him to pool around him, to skip his lifetime’s worth of middlemen, to concentrate on her strange skin, her amphibian eyes, her haunting moans, repulse himself with them and punish himself this way.

The beating helped, too. He watched globules of his own blood bead black on the sand.

Luz was unable to stop it. Eventually, the crowd dispersed of its own accord, as if each participant’s savagery had all at once run its course. They drifted away.

Luz sat beside Ray, but did not touch his wounds. What could she have done for him that he could not do for himself? She sat; he lay. Wisconsin a mirage, burned off. They both grieved it in silence.

At some point, Levi summoned them.

“I’m sorry about all that,” Levi said to Ray, the pulp of him. Jimmer was with him in his dome, and Nico, too. Jimmer offered some salve. Ray, his throat singed, gestured his decline.

“Where’s Ig?” Luz asked.

“Yes, Ig,” said Levi. “I’m glad you asked.”

“Where is she?” Luz asked.

“Dal has her,” Jimmer said softly.

“What have you noticed about Ig?” Levi asked. “What do you see when you see her?”

Luz said nothing.

“I know you know she’s different, Luz. Atypical, an anomaly. Do you know why?”

“Let me see her, please.”

“I know why.” He went on. “I believe Ig is touched. Her moaning is of the same frequency as the dune’s song.”

Jimmer nodded his assent. “She hears this place powerfully. More so than any of us.”

Luz said, “Levi, we’ve been through this.”

“We’re going through it again,” Levi said. “But we’re taking a different trail this time. The direct route.”

“What are you talking about?” though she knew. How long had she known? It was hard to say.

“We’ll be taking Ig now.”

“What?”

Jimmer said, “She needs to be here.”

Luz told them this was fucking madness. She said certainly they were insane. “Give her to you? You’re delusional.” No one seemed to hear her.

“We can take care of her. Keep her well.” Jimmer.

“Who is ‘we’?”

“All of us. Everyone.”

“Not me,” said Luz. “Not Ray.”

Ray was looking to his lap.

Levi said, “Ray is a contagion.”

A spasm went through the men, but Jimmer neutralized it. “Please, gentlemen.”

“I apologize,” Levi said to Ray. “This has nothing to do with you. With either of you, really.”

He was right, Luz knew. She was obsolete. She saw it in Ray’s eyes, in Jimmer’s twitching hand, heard it in Levi’s level voice. Luz went into her corridor again. Ray was at one end and Ig was at the other. The algebra of the situation was balancing itself in her mind. Dallas was a better mother than she’d ever be — that was true, even before Levi said, “If you leave Ig, I will let you go. More than that. I’ll give you a vehicle, food, water. I’ll show you the way out. You’ll go on with your life like you were meant to. Like you planned. The two of you.”

There was not much else to say. Or there was plenty to say, but Ray’s vocal cords had been burned to useless, and anything Luz could say felt futile, another handful of hot sand in the mouth. These decisions had been made before this discussion — before the prairie dog crossed their threshold. So though there was much to say, they said none of it.

“You can see her again, before you go,” Jimmer offered.

Luz said, quietly, “I wouldn’t survive that.”

—

The next day there were rumors of rain. Atypically dark clouds a promise in the west, a crackling anticipation lost on Luz. She had gone into herself, Ray could see, though she made some efforts to feign okayness, even saluted the black glass smear where the Blue Bird had been and said, “Good-bye, house.”

Ray was tired. Wisconsin throbbed dimly in the east, and he resolved to put one foot in front of the other, even though they were driving. Levi had honored his word, outfitted one of his better lorries with walls of water kegs and tarps and food. He’d made a map, all alluvial fans and gullies, the way out in the washes. After Nico delivered all this, Luz looked at the well-equipped lorry as though it injured her. “He really wants us gone,” she said.

Ray found a pen. On the back of his hand he wrote, Don’t you?

“Don’t I what?”

Want us gone?

“I do. That’s the problem.”

On his forearm: We’re not her people.

“No.”

Never were.

“No.”

On his palm he wrote,

You’re okay.

“Yes.”

You’re okay.

We’re

“I know.”

You’re okay.

We’re

She’ll be

“I know.”

But these were just words she was saying.

They were ready to go. Some people woke from their siestas and emerged to watch them leave. No one spoke. Luz and Ray dawdled a little, though they were not sure why until Dallas appeared, Ig in her arms.

The girl’s big head swiveled around a little, taking everything in. Her freckles, the divots in her head, all the injuries visited upon her in so short a time. Luz quietly took Ray’s hand.

She wanted Ig to reach for her, to plead for her, to fling herself from Dallas’s arms and wail. She wanted this and more, more, more. Mama, I’ve got so much want in me. But Ig was silent, luminous as a candle, still and indifferent.

Dallas said, “Say ‘bye-bye,’ Ig.”

Ig did not.

Luz clasped Ray’s hand tighter, for fear she would reach up and touch the baby’s soft skin, her colorless hair — it would be her undoing.

Luz did not reach for Ig, but Ig did reach for Luz. One spindly arm outstretched between them, her grub fingers curling and uncurling. Luz watched it. Ray watched her watch it. Take it, he said in his mind, this prayer all his own. Luz stood, unmoving, as if hypnotized by the pale hand, its frank and tender need, and then she leaned back, away, forever out of reach.

“Her name is Estrella,” she told Dallas. “After my mother.”

Dallas nodded, then turned. As they went, Ig moaned and clucked a little, to Dallas. Luz and Ray watched them until Ig’s pale halo dissolved into the blinding glory of the dune.

Those sounds stayed with them as they fled, though Ray — all fear and blessed anticipation — would hear nothing beneath the fearsome whine of the lorry. But Luz kept on hearing those Ig sounds, her seer’s song. She tried to hear the ways it harmonized with the dune, though what she heard was the engine working, dead scrub crunching, dry sand yielding when they dived into the wash. She tried and tried and soon all she heard was her trying, Ig crying — no, that was her. Her breath shuddered, heart thundered, and so she did not hear the actual thunder at their back, nor the sky opening up. She did not smell the rain coming.

What she felt, beyond the painful range of Ig, was the astonishing relief of quitting. Taking her rightful position in that long line of runners and flakes. Those were her people salting mines, jumping claims, forging bond certificates, fudging the rail route, sending dudes searching for lost gollers. Following the plow and yellowing the news. Antsy pioneers, con artists and sooners, dowsers and gurus, Pentecosts and Scientologists. Muscle heads, pill-poppers, pep talkers, drama queens and commuters. Fluffers, carpetbaggers, migrant pickers disappeared, entrepreneurs in never-were garages, all those servers. She was all of them, at last. Malibu Barbie and Manzanar. San Simeon and San Quentin. Neverland Ranch and Alcatraz. She was Boyle Heights, Fruitvale, La Habra. Koreatown, Cambodia Town, Filipinotown, Japantown, Little Tokyo, Little Seoul, Little Manila, Little Saigon, Little Taipei, Little Moscow, Little Kabul, Little Arabia, Little Persia, Little Armenia, Little Pakistan, Little India, Little Italy, Little Ethiopia, Venice Beach. Drained lakes, sulfur seas, yucca forests dried to paper, redwoods blighted and departed, sequoias and pinyon pines tinder for a never-satisfied wildfire. These were her people. Speculators and opportunists, carnival barkers and realtors, imagineers, cowards and dreamers and girls. Mojavs. Eyes peeled for the flash of ore, the flash of camera, the wet flesh of fruit. Gold, fame, citrus. Every erotic currency harvested green or yellow or the profound underground black of oil gone red-brown when slid between two fingers. Clear — whatever color you want it to be. The color of diamonds kissed by light. Bathe in it, fling it into the air, carpet the desert in Bermuda and Buffalo and Kentucky blue. Blast it into the night sky, burble it at every porte cochere and waiting room atrium, adorn it with koi, trout, dolphins, killer whales. Freeze it with freezing machines and glide down atop it in the sunshine. Hold it icy against your injuries. Cut it with sugar, with liquor, with pesticide, blast for gold or gas with it, grow creatures with it. Ride it, spray it into the street, swim in it, soak in it, drink it in, piss it away.

The flood came upon them like an animal, like a vengeful live thing, earth-colored and savagely fast. Ray took it for a sandalanche at first, as the wriggling fingers surrounded the lorry. Its true properties came to them both at the same time. They looked at each other.

“It’s water, Ray. Is it water?”

Ray attempted to pronounce “Everything okay,” but his withered cords did not permit it. The flood lifted the lorry. The truck was afloat, no longer their own, and silty dun water around their ankles proved it.

Luz leaned over the edge of the lorry and baptized her hand. “Beautiful.”

Ray braked and steered, but these efforts were as useless as his voice. He remembered some rescue training, some advice for preserving one’s aliveness. Against great pain he tried to say Stay.

But Luz’s hand was on the handle. Ray reached for it as she swung the door open. She said, coolly and with a hard grace, “I have to go, baby.”

Ray lunged for her. But she was out of the lorry, stepping to her waist in the opaque rage of water. It pushed her and she lurched, nearly fell, but her face was serene. Ray scrambled to pull her in, but she would not allow it.

She would not allow it. Ray’s phrase years later, in Wisconsin, the Carolinas. In Greencastle, Indiana, where the soybeans no longer grew.

“I’m okay,” Luz shouted back over the miraculous roar of water, all those prayers answered late. “I’d be okay,” she revised, smiling before she slipped forever under, “if I could just get my feet under me.”