The road was a minor one, and the cars only occasional, heard at a distance and swishing past to fade equally slowly in the other direction. Anne heated up a can of refried beans and wrapped them with some lettuce and tomatoes in a couple of tortillas, and carried her dinner outside with a bottle of beer to sit on one of the old telephone poles that had been laid down to mark the limits of the pullout.
The night was so still, she could hear the bubbles rising in the bottle from the ground between her feet. She left the second tortilla on the plate because the crunch of teeth on lettuce offended her ears, and because she wanted to listen, and to see, and to breathe.
She wrapped her arms around herself and raised her face to the stars, tentatively taking stock. Her scalp and the bare nape of her neck felt cold and light without the thick covering of hair. Her many aches were already fading, and she was beginning to accept what she was embarked on, starting to feel better about the whole thing, abandoning her classes and the puppies and haring off after Glen's community. No, better than acceptance: she was feeling good. Clean and strong, in fact. Reborn.
With that knowledge, in this place, she could finally admit to herself the deep, hidden reason that her nerves had been stretched to the point of snapping ever since she had seen the contents of Glen's envelope: the desert itself.
Since the days of the Hebrew fathers, and no doubt for unrecorded millennia before then, the desert had called out as a place of refuge for the disenfranchised, the oppressed, and the just plain mad. God spoke out in the desert—or perhaps humankind could simply hear the divine voice more clearly in a place clean of the distractions of busy life.
Anne Waverly had once loved the desert places. They had reached out to her as they had to countless others, men and women who had removed their followers from the temptations and distractions of life in the green places and settled them to grow in the hot, rocky soil of Egypt or Israel or Rajastan. She had loved the southwestern desert and revelled in its purity and silence, in the harsh simplicity of its choices, and would no doubt never have sought out a cabin in the deep woods had life been good to her.
Instead, the desert was where Aaron and Abby had died, and where Anne herself had walked so close to her own death. The desert was inextricably linked in her mind with the color of fresh blood and the nauseating smell of putrid meat.
She knew this. How could she not be aware of the cold feeling in her gut whenever she had to drive through eastern Oregon, or when she was forced to go to Texas or Arizona for research or to give a lecture and fly over all that vast dead land? She loathed the very idea of the desert, and given a choice would never have set foot again outside the rainy Northwest.
When she had laid eyes on Glen's aerial photograph of the Change compound in Arizona's high desert, her stomach had clamped up. It had remained taut, day and night, for the entire time since then, and had begun to loose only when the dry air had actually hit her face.
Funny, she thought as she had a thousand times in recent years, how the disastrous case in Utah eight years ago, four weeks of tension and despair that had ended with her getting shot, had faded in her memory. Not only was the shooting itself wiped from her memory, with the hours before only vague and sketchy, but all the rest had illogically and inexorably bonded itself to the original disaster in her life, Texas, becoming a seamless whole. In Anne's mind, Abby's death blended in with her own shooting, as if hundreds of miles and the ten intervening years of Anne's survival counted as nothing in the eyes of catastrophe. The two pains had merged, the Utah community under investigation tended to blur into the Texas Farm that she and Aaron had joined, and the desert had become one place, an environment inextricably linked with terror and pain.
She had set out fully expecting to spend the coming weeks shouldering the burden of what the desert represented to her, but now that she was actually here on a log with the grit under her boots and the memory-laden smell of the scrub in her nose, the burden was gone.
The relief was a bestowal of grace she could not have hoped for, so unexpected was it. She felt like weeping with release, or laughing with the sheer joy of living. She did neither; she merely sat with all her skin alive to the night, feeling the cold air waking her up and renewing her.
A dog barked far away, and a rooster crowed with irritating frequency from somewhere closer. A point of light moved across the heavens, becoming an airplane bound for Los Angeles or Asia. A car grew and whistled past without slowing, and faded, and when the headlights were gone, Anne raised her face to the heavens and saw the moon being born.
A delicate sliver of bright new moon hung above her in the cloudless expanse of black sky, sharp-edged and brilliant among the hard points of a million stars. A new moon was a good omen, Anne decided—at least, Ana Wakefield was sure to think so. Half-humorously, she lifted her bottle of beer to salute the vision, but before she could put the mouth of the bottle to her lips, to her astonishment the moon dimmed, flickered, and disappeared. From one end up to the other Anne watched the darkness crawl over it and take possession, leaving only a faint light shadow, like the impression that a brief glare makes on the retina. It was difficult not to feel uneasy, impossible not to feel relief when the crescent shape crept back into view. Then it wavered again, and was gone.
She watched for a quarter of an hour, openmouthed and oblivious to the cold and the cramp in her neck as the delicate crescent first was there, then gone. Eventually, whatever it was coming between the moon and its sun—high mountains on the other side of the world? distant masses of clouds? or just the curvature of the earth itself?—cleared away, and the moon resumed its place in the heavens, eternal and innocent as if it had never given reason to doubt its solidity.
For a believer in omens this would have been a mighty portent, the infant moon struggling to find the light that gave it definition. Among primitive peoples it would be the basis for myths about moon-eating demons and cause for lengthy political and theological debates, used by opposing sides to prove both divine support and disapproval of some controversial action.
How would Ana interpret the vision? Anne wondered. A woman who had worked her way through the I Ching (both coins and yarrow sticks), the tarot major and minor, and the consultation of crystals on a string would not take the birth pangs of the moon lightly. Perhaps I should drive over and buy that damned rooster, Anne mused, kill it, and spill its entrails in an attempt to divine the future.
Oh yes; it was easy enough to recognize an omen, in thing was how to read it.
III
Calcinatio
calcine (vb) To heat to a high temperature but
without fusing in order
to drive off volatile matter
or to effect changes
Calcination is the purgation of our Stone
Chapter Seven
From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)
The following morning Anne crossed the border into Arizona, and returned to winter.
Working her way south through California, she had seen a concentration of spring akin to the time-lapse film of an opening flower. In the Pacific Northwest the first bulbs had been pushing their determined heads into the cold; by northern California the almond blossoms were out; in the central part of the state the glorious full blush of spring flaunted itself from every apple orchard, every wisteria-draped fence, every front garden, and by the time Anne entered the desert it might have been a Portland summer.
Not, however, in Arizona. The only sign of burgeoning life Anne could see from the window of the roadside coffee shop where she sat with her hands wrapped around a hot cup of coffee was the spray of flame-colored flowers on the tips of the ocotillo cactus, and even those had tufts of snow weighting them down.