“Old hippies don’t die. They just quit drinking, take their milk thistle and liver enzyme counts.” Raven offers an unconvincing smile.
“Liver enzymes?” Amy wonders.
“Hep C,” Raven says.
“You have hepatitis C?” Amy is startled.
“We all do,” her mother replies, flat and off-hand. “I hope to live long enough to get Medicare.”
“Medicare?” Amy repeats.
“Medicare is just a word, like democracy and justice. It barely exists,” Raven says.
Her mother sits cross-legged on the floor at a low table, a child’s table, rolling a joint. When she offers it to her, Amy takes it. She left AA at the border. And half her IQ. Wasn’t that the deal?
The trailer is so minimal it seems unoccupied. There’s a tape deck that runs on batteries, a plate in what must be the kitchen and a bowl of bananas, strawberries and two onions. What’s become of the Navajo rugs, the carved oak furniture, the Mescalero Apache tribal wall hangings, Hopi baskets and masks? And where is the Santa Clara pottery?
She remembers the era they called the Harmonic Divergence. The commune dwindled. It dried up overnight like creeks in summer. First AIDS. Then the crisis no one anticipated. Their foundation was the exploration of human consciousness. Insidiously and inexorably, their beliefs were culturally degraded, marginalized and then outlawed.
They were a band of conceptual renegades, biochemical pioneers in an aesthetic frontier that was abruptly fenced. Suddenly, satellites provided surveillance. They were shorn of legitimacy. There’s no glamour in being a designated leper. Criminals have no justification. But there were treatments for their aberrant inclinations. Antidepressants. Rehab. AA. Support groups and disability payments. Everyone took the cure.
“I’m too old for this,” one of the Big Bobs or Big Jebs said. “I’m not taking a dump in mud in winter. Not at 45.”
There was attrition. Drugs were now controlled by men with computers in Nassau and Houston. Big Wade and Big Jake had arthritis and diabetes and the wrong skillset for the emerging global market place. They dispersed, took their medications for depression, and meditated in shacks on canyon rims, proclaiming themselves Zen masters. They had tape decks and bags of Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and Metformin. And shelves of SSRis and Tricyclics. Nothing worked, but it was free. Some found apartments in town with electricity and watched CNN on 16 inch black and white televisions.
The Espanola property accrued to Raven. She was the last one left, keeping the faith in derelict rooms lit by kerosene lamps, incense and candles. Rooms collapsed around her. The roof fell down in chunks and walls disintegrated into powder. That’s why she purchased the trailer. And what was that green square outside? Was Raven growing marijuana?
“Corn.” Raven is amused. “Subsistence economy. Tomatoes. Squash. I put seeds in the ground. I eat the plants. A simple life. Much too boring for a professor like you. But you always thought me dull.”
Not dull, Amy wants to correct, just affected, predictable, and formulaic. The trailer reminds her of a boat, ingenuously compact, deceptively pulling in or out of the miniature closets and cabinets. They had a boat in Maui, she remembers later, when winds rise and batter the metal sides in a sudden squall with lightning.
They are laying side by side on twin cots like berths, rocking. The trailer sways and Amy thinks, We are floating through metaphors and into symbolic oceans, clutching our charred text as life preservers. We make a telephone call. Or stand in the glaring light of a liquor store on the edge of the Mohave and the course of our life is changed.
Once during the thunderstorm, Amy sits bolt upright and for an inconclusive moment, thinks she sees Raven standing naked at the tiny window, weeping. Her mother by moonlight, whitened, whittled.
“I’m a moon crone,” Raven says, directly to the night.
Her mother has sensed her movement, her intake of breath. “I’m 52 and haven’t had a period in years. I’m on hormones and I’m still burning up.” Raven turns toward her and speaks into the darkness. “You don’t have to fear me anymore. I’m not a competitor. You removed my 9 heads. Hydra is gone. You beheaded me. See me as I am.”
“Are you lonely?” Amy wonders, uncertain. She’s an ethnographer and Raven is her subject.
“Lonely?” her mother repeats. “I have two friends. New Mexico and Bob Dylan. He wrote the soundtrack for my life. When he dies, I’ll be a widow.”
Amy wakes at noon. Raven has assembled sleeping bags, a tent, stacks of camping equipment and a variety of canvas bags under the awning in front of the tiny yellow trailer.
“Let’s rock and roll.” Raven is enthusiastic. “Mesa Verde. I feel a spiritual experience coming.”
This woman has absolutely no sense of irony, Amy thinks. She inhabits an era of oral tradition, intuition and omens. The constellations aren’t named. One worships flint and thunder, bargains with stars and drums in solitude.
They drive north, Raven taking the curves too fast. Amy assembles a random list of what she hates about the Southwest. How everyone is making jewelry and searching for shrines. Santa Fe is an outdoor theme mall. Silver is a wound that gleams. It’s a cancer. It lays itself out in strands of necklaces and belts, a glare of dead worms, obscene. The entire Navajo nation is home in a stupor, smoking chiva and crack and watching TV while numbly pounding out conches and squash blossoms. It’s sickening.
Amy remembers a town on the way to Las Cruces. Shacks where she sees lava mountains out a broken window. Her real father is coming down from the reservation to see her. He’s out of prison. Amy hasn’t met him. Big Ed or Big Jeb are buying pot. Or maybe selling it. The adults are eating peyote.
Her mother and a woman she doesn’t recognize sit on the floor in the lotus position, stringing necklaces and laughing. The TV is on maximum volume, picture and sound wavering, ghosted and distorted. She became dizzy, and perhaps she fainted. She is carried to a car. It’s a special day. She is certain. Yes, it’s her thirteenth birthday and her father doesn’t come down from the reservation to see her after all. Later, the woman reaches through the car window, dangling necklaces. She offers her beads, silver and turquoise. Amy shakes her head no.
“Mesa Verde is a revelation,” Raven reveals. “The Buddha must have built it.”
“Didn’t extraterrestrials do the construction?” Amy asks. “Aliens from Roswell with green blood and implants in their necks.”
Raven smokes a joint. Amy Gold turns away, angry. She rejects the concept that enlightenment can be geographically pinpointed, that one can chart a route, follow a map, drive there, and purchase a ticket. Spirituality has been reduced to another commodity. Can’t Raven comprehend that? Probably not.
Amy experiences a disappointment so overwhelming it erases the possibility of speech. She drinks from her vodka bottle surreptitiously, leaning against the car window while afternoon falls in green and blue pieces against her face. The time space continuum is fluid and it’s flowing across her skin. It’s breaking across her flesh in a series of glass splinters.
They spend the afternoon in Indian ruins, peering through holes and slots implying windows. They climb reconstructed steps and wood ladders into the cliff dwellings. The repetition of identical ceremonial rooms is relentless. She feels sullen and futile.
“You’re still a bitter child,” Raven says, voice soft. It’s not an accusation. “You have a one word vocabulary. All you say is no.”
“You’re the queen of yes. What did it get you?”
Silence. Amy is wondering what the Anasazi did, how they lived. They smoked pot, no doubt, and strung beads, got drunk, hunted and gathered herbs. In between, they engaged in acts of domestic violence and child abuse. Now a slap, then a torn hymen. Human nature hasn’t changed. In 641, a pope decreed that a man could have only a single wife. But there’s no evolutionary adaptation to support that opinion.