At last, Heidi peels herself away. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
“I know.”
Her skin is cool, she’s smiling, and her eyes aren’t the least bit moist. “Get some sleep. You’ll need it.” She hurries toward her car, then turns back, rotating one finger against her skull. “Thank God.”
“Thank God what?” I’m standing in the doorway holding a towel closed around my waist.
“Thank God my casserole only needs to be heated.”
16
WAKE UP THIS MORNING with pizzicato Lunchtime Movie music running in my head. It won’t stop. Implanted violins follow me in and out of the shower. I Q-tip my ears extra hard, but the plinking doesn’t leave with the wax. Turn on the radio to drown it out and a baritone reads to me:
“Puerto Rican terrorist Concepcion Buendia said today that he spared the life of Treasury Secretary Richard Goodyear when Secret Service agents made their dawn raid to rescue the kidnapped official because he couldn’t bring himself to hate him.
“‘I had all the time I needed to shoot,’ Buendia told investigators. ‘But I could not succeed in seeing him as an enemy, only a man who was sleeping.’”
I think that once or twice watching a woman sleep, overcome by her stillness, I have wept. Not something I am particularly proud of, but there it is. Every tub on its own bottom. Every lonely beast in its own separate bed.
No time for coffee, have to get moving right away. This Lunchtime Movie room is like something pressing on my throat. I’ll drive with all the windows open and the speedometer pinned. A couple aspirin for my stiff neck and then I wrestle clothes on over my wet skin. Boots in case I feel like hiking, a hat to shade my eyes. On the way out, I check one of my experimental stations. Day 10 for the mold garden, if I haven’t flubbed my count, and a good crop of cottony mycelium growing on the Little wedge of papaya; thousands of light-gray spores so it resembles mouse fur. In the other mayo jar, beginning liquefaction of a freestone cherry indicates the presence of larval maggots. Some things are running smoothly and right. The speechless things.
Mrs. O. is folded into the cement bench by the office, waiting for a cab. Her feet dangle in the air. She looks ready to turn to powder inside, and seeing her just now, for some reason I imagine small birds spit-roasted over an open fire. I pick her lumpy red handbag up out of the petunia bed.
“Took no notice when I put it down,” she says. “Been fasting and I’m just a bit lightheaded.”
“Fasting?”
“Fruit juice four times a day. I needed to move out all the starch that was clogging me up.”
Mrs. O. is planning to spend the afternoon at her breath alchemy workshop with Master Han. Self-healing, she explains, is the only kind that works, but at the same time you need to be guided.
“Master Han believes in reeducating the brain by tracing how a person moved in infancy from prone to standing up. He tries to discover gaps in your movements supported by the endocrine system. Glands can reflect mind states, you know.”
“You want to save the cab money, I’ll ride you over.”
She grins and runs her knuckles up my arm. “You’re a good New York boy, anyone can see that. Generous. No, you go ahead your way. I like to talk to Mr. Suarez on the trip and I brought him kugel.”
One of the lumps in her bag, cold starch. So I leave her there by the petunias with the sun sparking yellow on her stainless steel cane.
I head west out of town, a squirrel’s jawbone swinging from my rearview mirror on black thread. I picked it from desiccate remains near a convenience grocery, just a few feet beyond the asphalt apron in a snarl of sticks and paper. Kneeling there, smelling the exhaust of cars left running for the quick-stop shop, I tugged at the small worn teeth and they came away in my fingers. I head west toward itching thirst and the air force test range. The matinee violins are still with me, but the tempo has slowed.
The topography of space operas. Except for what my three thousand pounds of Detroit steel displaces, the air is motionless. But something in it seems to bend the light, angle it into my face so that even behind my defenses of tinted glass, visor, and hat I must squint. As I go straight and hard down the blacktop I pass a million invisible roads of lizard, millipede, coral snake, tarantula, giant hairy scorpion. Scattered plants are spiked or spined or even venomous. No escape from this landscape, its inaudible ferocity.
Now begins the barbed fencing, the fat red lettering of NO CIVILIAN ACCESS Bleak buzzard acres you could prospect for spent casings and pilots’ bones, where the shallow soup holes are poisoned with radon and sulfur. Far off, below the rusty red foothills, I sight a line of sheds. Hard glare on metallic roofs, and tan smudges that must be plywood nailed over doors and windows. Haunted barracks, maybe a nerve gas depot now, heavy drums all sealed away. Another mile of fencing, AUTHORIZED PERSONELL ONLY, a corroded and de-tired Jeep — human earmarks more ominous than forlorn. And somewhere it can’t be seen, so Opatowski says, they’ve built a replica of Saudi oilfields for paratroop maneuvers, and a dummy target range of silos.
I pull over to consult my map. Nothing ahead, for thirty miles at least, until a place called Holy Smoke. But not the tiniest blister in the black line that represents the road, only the name floating above it. A cartographer’s prank? Holy Smoke. I’d rather try for it than turn around.
A good twenty minutes without billboard or marker before I find a turnoff. A crude wooden sign says: THIS IS NOT A ROAD. That’s good enough for me. I head up the gravel track, steering wheel wobbling in my hands. It takes very little time to establish the bona fides of that sign, the conscientious citizen who scrawled it. Dry gulches intersect the nonroad, logs and cobbles in them I have to clear away. Revving and swaying, revving again, I lunge across. The pungent aroma of scorched hardware reaches me. Now the washouts are rougher and the stones sharper. I stop to check the undercarriage for wounds. Nothing yet. Then I remember my spare is low on air, also bald. A cooler head would prevail, but that’s something else I didn’t bring.
Starting upward now into jumbled hills, I ignore what the dashboard gauges tell me. My tongue is a spoiled oyster, sour and thick. And too weary to tell me what a fool I am. On these steeper grades the rear wheels hesitate and spin, but I make the crest; then down, which is just as bad or worse, slewing into chuckholes, sledding over loose rock when the brakes lock up.
In what passes for a valley here, a barely sloping trench between low sills of rock, I stop for something to chew: juniper needles. A trifle dizzy, but it’s easier to focus from this small wedge of shade. Those dark lumps, yes, it’s there just a few hundred yards down the line (like all good explorers, I had to find it by mistake). Holy Smoke…or something. Not the trim oasis I’d let myself imagine. No oil company logo rising on metal stilts, no hope of iced pop. I think I hear the wail of a dog, lovesick or dying. Maybe just a streak of wind in the remnants of a useless place.
Leaving the machine to recuperate, I step out for dereliction with a cautious stalking pace. Apprehension fades the closer I get. A street full of sage balls and dead wood, two rows of tilted buildings, no more than lumber teepees, some of them. I announce myself by drumming on a mangle washer halfway buried in sand. No answer. A ghost town even the ghosts have left. Like all good explorers, I’ve been betrayed by my map. And by my zeal to move forward. I remember a character man on Gunsmoke pulling his whiskers and drawling, “This country is hell on a Christian.” I remember the story of a boy scout who survived Death Valley by drinking his own urine. But long as I’m here I might as well poke around. The amateur enthuses in the implacable face of error. I ease my head through windows fringed with cobweb, look over great floorboard holes in which biting things are lurking in the cool. With a piece of glass I carve the date and my initials in a soft gray doorpost. Splintered furniture, buckshot patterns on old tin, are signs that more than weather has pulled this place apart. But not lately. The shotgun holes are rusted, the liquor bottles milky from the scouring of blown sand. In the last house on the left, a brick chimney all that’s holding it up, I find under gummy fallen shingles a toy shovel and a 1952 issue of Field & Stream. Rats have chewed the pages up for nesting fodder and the rest comes apart in my hands. But I wonder what the people in this house so far from water thought as they read of salmon climbing a waterfall, walleye in the deep blue lakes of Michigan. Probably not much. Living on the edge of things this way, you give up the capacity to envision. The rest of the world gradually disappears behind layers of fuzzy curtain, while on your side there is nothing but the abuse of the sun and this fierce, racking ground that extends on and on to the ocean, wherever that might be. Day-to-day survival becomes a kind of madness. This comforts me as I squat in the rubble with my hat sweat-pasted to my head, trying to keep myself from staring into the sun. The nothingness comforts me. It is pristine.