Old Arcan himself came in the bar and made one of his regular attempts at playing the host. He claimed to be a direct descendant of one of the first men to cross Death Valley, but nobody believed it. His ex-wife told someone he’d been born plain Bill Judd. I watched him move from one guest to another, carefully selecting those on whom he wished to bestow his hospitality. Thankfully, I wasn’t among them.
I found myself thinking about Sophie Delauney. They were the kind of thoughts I had no business thinking, that caused pleasure and pain in equal measure, but I thought them anyway. Some lives were full of certainties but mine seemed to be made up only of “what-ifs” and “maybes”. It should have been no surprise that it had become less real to me.
I ordered another drink and stared into the mirror behind the counter. The people in there seemed to have purpose in their lives, to know what they were doing, where they were going. If I watched long enough, paid attention to the details, maybe I’d discover how to make my life more real. Arcan was holding forth to the group of Japs sitting round a table across the bar. Jaime was working his routine on a blonde girl at the end of the counter. She looked bored, and I guessed the only reason she was tolerating his bullshit was the lack of any other diversion. I wondered if the real Jaime was having any better luck than the one in the mirror. And here was Sophie Delauney, standing just a few feet behind me and watching my reflection watch her, or maybe it was her reflection watching us. Do mirrors take in sound the way they do light? I don’t think so. I couldn’t hear anything, no music, no talk, not even the clink of glasses. It was a long time before I remembered myself and thought to say hello. But a second before I did, she beat me to it. she climbed up onto the bar stool beside me and caught Jaime’s eye.
He was there in a shot. She pointed to my half-empty bottle of Dos Equis, told him to bring one of those and a glass of Merlot. I said I hadn’t expected to see her again. She shrugged and told me they’d had a long day. Drove down to Badwater where Delauney had decided to hike out on the salt flats. Went half a mile before the heat got to him and he returned to the car. Later, they went to Chloride City. She wasn’t looking at me as she talked, but at the guy in the mirror, the fellow who looked just like me but whose thoughts were not the same as mine. The ache in her voice seemed to hint at some inner turmoil. I wanted to offer words of comfort and reassurance, tell her everything would be okay. But thinking the words was easier than saying them.
I asked if she’d seen any ghosts up there. She shook her head and smiled. No ghosts, just dust, heat and silence. I understood about the silence, but with all those ghosts up there she’d expected something more. Why hadn’t the inhabitants from Chloride City ’s second boom period learned anything from the first? I told her there were more fools in the world than she might have imagined. Gold wasn’t the only illusion that drew people to the Valley.
Did I mean that literally? I wasn’t sure. I wondered if Delauney had seen anything out on the salt flats beyond Badwater, if his mind had been troubled by visions he couldn’t explain. But I saw no sign of his existence in the mirror and didn’t think to ask. Sophie wanted to know about my life and I told her some things that seemed important, others that kept a smile on her face. She told me Paul wanted her to have another child. She wasn’t sure what to do. The dreams and ambitions she’d once had were largely unfulfilled, there were things she hadn’t yet grasped. I understood her to mean that this was something she’d never told Delauney.
And then he was there, clapping me on the back and giving Sophie a proprietary kiss on the cheek. She fell quiet then, seemed to retreat into herself. I tried to maintain the connection to her but his voice kept intruding on my thoughts. There was nothing to distinguish his words from the other noises in the bar, a wavering chorus of sounds whose real purpose was little more than to fill the silence. A feeling of despair grew inside me as I watched Sophie close herself off. Her smile was gone and the lines around her eyes signalled the dreams she could no longer give voice to.
Delauney was asking me if it was possible to go to the Racetrack and join route 190 heading west without coming back on himself. I told him it would add sixty or seventy miles to his journey, most of it on poor dirt roads. He nodded and said they might make the detour on their way out of the Valley tomorrow. I asked him what he hoped to see up there. Same as anyone, he said: he wanted to see the moving rocks for himself or, at the very least, the trails they left in their wake.
I told him he wouldn’t, no one ever did. He believed me, he said, but seeing beat believing any day of the week.
I watch the shadows compose themselves. The way they move across mountains or desert dunes reveals how fluid identity really is. What we think of as solid has no more real substance than a whisper or a lie. It’s just light and shadow which make the unknown recognizable, which sculpt unfamiliar surfaces into configurations we think we know. We stare a while at these faces or shapes, glad they mean something to us even if we can’t name them, and then we blink and when we look again the face has changed to something we can’t recognize. We try to retrieve the familiar face, needing to see it one more time to confirm that it was who we thought it was, but the new image persists, erasing the old. It’s like trying to see the two leading faces of a line drawing of a transparent cube at the same time — it can’t be done. One face is always behind the other. We close our eyes again and when we look one more time there isn’t even a face to see, just a shadow moving over rock, sliding into all its dark places. It was the kind of illusion that made me feel less certain about my place in the world.
I woke up this morning no longer sure I am who I thought was. I showered, dressed and ate breakfast, feeling like an intruder in my own home. I sat in the Expedition, spoke to Rydell on the radio and drove up towards Hunter Mountain, feeling I was watching another man try out my life. I had hoped to find some certainties up there, something to which I could anchor myself but all I found was that everything flows. I didn’t need to see it to know it was happening. Even the forests of pinyon pine and juniper were further down the mountain slopes than they were the day before.
In the spring, after heavy winter rainfalls, wild flowers turn certain parts of the Valley into a blaze of purple, red and orange. It wasn’t possible to reconcile such beauty with that scorched and barren hell. If such a vastness could be transformed in what, in geological terms, was less than the blink of an eye, how could any of us hope to ever stay the same?
All those voices I heard on the radio — how could I be sure that they were speaking to me? If I couldn’t be certain who I was, then how could they know I was the one they wanted to talk to? So when Rydell’s voice came out of the radio, I had no way of knowing if it was really him. Short of driving down to Furnace Creek and standing right in front of him. And even then, there was no guarantee.
I heard Hannafin — or someone who sounded like her — asking where I was. I wanted to answer her but when I tried to talk I realized that I had nothing to say. I already knew where I was and where I was going. There was nothing Hannafin, or the voice that might have been hers, could do for me that I couldn’t do for myself.
This person I had become had no more illusions. He was capable of seeing things as they really were. As he drove past the talc mines, across Ulida Flat and north into Hidden Valley, he was aware the land was watching him. He heard the creak of Joshua trees, the distant groans of the mountain ranges and the listless sigh of an unfelt breeze. And in those sounds he heard himself also, speaking in his usual voice, his tone neutral, the words precise, as he told them all they needed to know, the way he always did. Only it wasn’t him talking.