Now it’s noon in Los Angeles. She packs her office. It’s the end of the semester and she won’t be back in the fall. Alfred Baxter Coleman, chair of the promotion and tenure committee, has successfully convinced his colleagues they don’t need her. She’s only half-Indian, after all. Christ, she was born in Laguna Beach. They’ve hired a Palestine to replace her. It’s a more profound historical statement and irrefutably global.
Amy wraps a pottery vase in the school newspaper. Ink encrusts her fingers and she feels soiled to the bone. She doesn’t want to put her books in cardboard boxes again. It’s an obsolete rite of empty repetition. It’s the opposite of propitiation. It’s failure in a cardboard box the size of an infant’s coffin. Even her fingers resist.
The square book caskets. She’s been carrying dead texts from state to state, up and down flights of apartment steps bordering alleys and parking lots, Bougainvillea and Oleander strangling on cyclone fences. Amy realizes she doesn’t want the books anymore, period.
What she wants is a wound that bleeds and requires sutures and anesthesia. What she wants is a cigarette. Amy gathers her cosmetics and tape cassettes from her desk drawer. She takes the gym bag with her tennis racket, bathing suit, jeans, diamondback rattlesnake boots, flashlight and mace. She wraps her raincoat across her shoulders and thinks, I’m down the road. I’m out of here.
She wants someone to call, “Professor Gold?” Then she can reply, “Not anymore.” Her response will be fierce and laconic. It will deconstruct itself as you watch. Then it will explode in your face.
Amy Gold shoves U2’s Joshua Tree into the cassette player. She replaces it with a ZZ Top cassette. Yes, it’s an afternoon for the original nasty boys from Texas. They provide a further dimension to the concept of a garage band. After all, you don’t have to just rehearse there. You can throw a mattress on the floor, invite your friends, drink a case of bourbon, shoot coke and orchestrate a gang rape. Maybe she should get down even further. Maybe it’s an afternoon for chainsaws and a massacre.
She turns onto the freeway, and considers her final encounter with Professor Alfred Baxter Coleman. In instant replay, her knees wobble and she almost falls down. But she doesn’t. She manages to stay on her feet and give Alfred the finger. If she wasn’t having a seizure of vertigo, she would mace him.
Los Angeles is at her back, a solid sheet of grease that’s not entirely unpleasant. That’s why she’s been able to inhabit this city. Ugliness is a kind of balm. Beauty makes her uncomfortable. She instinctively averts her eyes from a flawless face the way some recoil from a car crash.
Amy Gold relentlessly attempts to annihilate all certified versions of perfection. The conventionally sanctioned snow-dusted mountains above wild flowers in alpine meadows that look designed to be photographed and sold as posters. She’s repelled by images resembling calendar covers. They’re faux artifacts of what you didn’t actually experience. And she loathes towns with contrived lyrical names that could be the titles of country western songs. They’re an accompaniment for the plastic scorpions tourists buy in stores with moccasins made in China and ceremonial headdresses of dyed turkey feathers.
That’s why she left Raven the southwest interior of the country. Amy took the coasts and gave her mother everything else. That is their real division of assets. She took abstraction, hierarchy, and systematic knowledge and left Raven the inexpressible, the preliterate, the region of magic chants and herbs. It was a sort of divorce. Her mother could have Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, and she would get her doctorate.
Raven accepts landscape as her due. She expects and collects it. Raven, staring at a sun setting in a contagion of magenta and irradiated purple. It’s begging to be absolved. Raven nods in acknowledgement, shaking her waist-length black hair as clouds pass in a flotilla above them. She pauses, as if expecting the skies to actually part.
Raven, wind-blown and barefoot is prepared for the sky to form a tender lavender mouth and confess everything. It’s the third or fourth day of a peyote fast, and her mother is a pueblo priestess, accustomed to tales of routine felonies and unavoidable lies. Transgressions aren’t absolute. They’re a matter of interpretation. Raven takes her form of communion beneath an aggressively streaked sunset the texture of metal. Amy knows the sky is a conventional polite lie. It’s politically correct misdirection. There’s something else behind clouds, a subterfuge of malice.
Her childhood is incoherent, images that stall stylized and suspect. They might be postcards. That’s curious, she realizes, they didn’t take photographs. Even when her mother married the magazine photographer, there were no cameras, no visual artifacts.
“You can’t paste this between album pages,” Raven says, standing in a meadow, her bare arms stretched out like twin milk snakes. Her paisley skirt is ripped to her thigh and wind-swirled. This what, precisely, Amy wants to know.
“Experience can’t be reduced to a 4 by 6 inch still,” her mother says. “People stick their loves in cellophane prisons. They incarcerate images. Then they put these cemeteries on coffee tables. They’re mockeries.”
Raven is topless on a mesa festooned with pinion and juniper, tilting her face to the sky, memorizing a spectrum of purple that runs from lilac and velvet iris to crushed antique maroon. It’s an alphabet bordered by cobalt and a magenta that’s gone a step too far, and committed itself to red. Amy wonders what can be distilled from such a sequence. You can’t arrange it like paint on a palette, or orchestrate it to sound like flutes or ferry bells. You can’t order it into stanzas or paragraphs. In short, it’s entirely useless.
Her mother exists in a series of indiscriminate moments, each already pre-framed and merely waiting for lighting cues. Raven poses with a canyon lake as a backdrop. Amy half expects afternoon to dissolve into a car commercial. This is what she resists. No to the plateaus of northern New Mexico. No to the vivid orange intrigue of sunsets you could stencil on T-shirts. No to men who spend summers in sleeping bags, backpacks filled with Wild Turkey and kilos of cocaine. No to Raven in August, scented with dope and pinion, sleeping oblivious under lightning and an outrage of stars.
“I’ve been tattooed,” Raven laughs in the morning, making coffee over a fire of purple sage. “Look.” she angles her face toward the new boyfriend. Her face is tanned peach, without a single line or freckle. Amy possesses a secret accumulation of invisible injuries. They’re the most exquisite. If there’s an entity Raven calls Buddha, it is these clandestine self-inflicted lacerations that attract him.
“You can live myth or be buried by it. It’s your choice,” Raven says. It’s her cocaine voice, vague and distant and leaking light. “I’ve been more intimate with this canyon than all 5 husbands combined,” she confides. “It’s revealed more. And it’s been more generous.”
Amy is on the periphery, simultaneously chilled and parched. She is not a team player. The sky is relentlessly alien. Plateaus are layered like a chorus of red mouths that have nothing to say to her.
Before nightfall and the desert, Amy Gold stops for gas. In a convenience store, fixed in the glare of anonymous waxy light, she decides, on inexplicable impulse, to change her life. She deliberately buys a pack of cigarettes, though she hasn’t smoked in eight years.
“Vodka,” she says, pointing to a fifth. The two-edged syllables are inordinately pale and mysterious, like something you can’t procure on this planet. I’ve been too long without the traditions, she thinks. Eight years. I’m estranged from my true self. I’m broken off at the root, amputated. I must graft myself back.