A CACTUS, I said the next morning. I want my very own.
Come on, you have your very own. He stopped rolling up our mummy bags to strike an iconic cactus pose.
That’s a saguaro, I told him, remembering from Common Cacti of the Southwest. They only live in Arizona.
Hey, good.
At the saguaro festival in July they make cactus wine, I told him. It symbolizes rain replenishing the earth.
I’m very proud of you.
And you’re a lovely cactus, I said, but this way if you ever leave me, I will always have the real thing. See? I pointed to a small Joshua tree in the distance, an isolated straggler. I waited for him to ask Why do you think I would ever leave you?, but he did not.
Ah, he said, smiling his teacher’s smile. It said You are about to learn something, and I was sick of it. But a Joshua tree is not a cactus. It’s a yucca. It’s actually part of the lily family.
All right.
Not every desert plant is a cactus, he said. There’s yucca and agave and bear grass and ocotillo and creosote and—
All right!
He pointed to the ugly killer cholla that had attacked me. That’s a cactus. Chollas are cacti.
Fine. I’ll make do with a cholla. A lowly, ugly, common desert weed.
No.
You thought they were beautiful, I said.
We’re not taking a cactus home, he said.
Why not?
He pointed out that the cactus had already wounded me, that I was still complaining about my throbbing leg, and that getting it home would be impossible.
You’re scared of a few glochids? I asked. Embrace what you fear.
He sighed. I waited. I waited for him to tell me we can’t disrupt the ecosystem of the desert. That tough as cacti are, they’re also vulnerable, that we might get it all the way home just to have it refuse to take root and then die. I waited for him to talk about indigenous nutrients in the desert soil, about fungal spores and etiolation. That we didn’t have room for the cactus at home, or space for its root system, that the concrete would snuff it out, choke it dead.
This is a national park, he said finally. Everything is protected here.
I wasn’t, I said.
We just looked at each other. Then he came and knelt next to me. He put his hand on the back of my skull, wove his fingers through my hair and tugged my head back, put his arms around me. He wanted me to clasp him back, I knew, but I wouldn’t give him that. We just sat there for a moment in silence, a heated, taut desert silence. I waited. He gave up first. He got up, took a bottle of water, and hiked all the way back to the truck for the shovel, twine, gloves, a tarpaulin, returned, and dug. I kept watch. We roped the cholla, steadied it in the wheelbarrow, strapped it to the bed of the truck with twine, camouflaged it with Hefty garbage bags, and drove home without talk. We planted the cactus in our found-rock-garden front yard. A week later I found a chipped ceramic Mexican child sleeping beneath its huge ceramic sombrero near a dumpster in the Fairfax District and brought it home. I tried to get Josh to debate whether the ceramic child was racist kitsch or just kitsch, but he only rolled his eyes at me. In the end we put it next to the cactus, facing the street. I called him our little ceramic son. And, as a little ceramic child, it had no moisture or heat or energy, so I knew it would always be safe from the cactus spines and could sleep in peace.
My leg healed, of course. The wound became a spray of small roseate scars. And the cactus did take root in our found-rock plot, did just fine. For two more months it lived and breathed and grew, did very well. I hoped it would blossom soon, give us showy violet flowers. It didn’t, but I smiled at it every time I came and went, every time I looked out the window. I admired how the sun on its silvery spines made it shimmer, made it luminous. And every time I thought with pleasure that stealing the cactus was the type of unwholesome, dishonest thing Josh would never have done in front of the junior high and high school kids, or by himself. But I got him to do it for me. I got him to break into the desert for me, plunder it to bring me jewels. I got him to tear a piece off the vastness, chain it down to a bound and finite space. Looking at the cactus always made me feel victorious. I would look at my healed leg scars and think I am inoculated now, I’m safe. I felt very peaceful and secure, until two months later, when Josh left me.
JOSH WAS KILLED in a plane crash. Not the kind where you’re on the plane. The kind where you start a fight with your girlfriend who loves you to death but who you say won’t let you breathe, is too clingy, so you decide to go off hiking by yourself because you need the space, you don’t want to do every single thing together, all the time, take and share every single breath with the woman who loves you to death, so you drive out to the Mojave by yourself in your truck, park it, and trek across the desert like Moses, through a field of Joshua trees with their grotesque, outstretched-to-God arms, to sleep under the stars and feel profoundly, vastly insignificant, and far overhead a Cessna Skyhawk SP with engine trouble sails downward, into the welcoming arms, and doesn’t see you because you’re a mere dot in the landscape, and you don’t see it, you just barely awake at the sputter, the swooping whine of what perhaps sounds like a very large desert bird, a hawk, or a screeching owl, or maybe the death cry of a lizard pierced by spikes, and so just as the plane crashes down—then you see it, yes, but it’s too late — and lands on top of you in a blaze of oil and shredding metal and burning yucca, creosote, ocotillo, maybe your last thought is I should have kissed the woman I love good-bye when I left, or I should have never left her to go outside where it’s harsh, unforgiving, dangerous, or at least I should have brought her with me so we could die together. That kind of plane crash. When they dug him out of the cratered brush and found his driver’s license, unsinged but the laminate melted into his thigh, they called and told me, and my first thought was It’s not fair to die in a plane crash if you’re not actually on the plane. Then I realized I was shaking and couldn’t walk properly, so I crawled into the bathtub. The porcelain was cold, wonderfully solid, anesthetic, and I could pull the shower curtain around to make myself a terrarium. I figured I could sleep there, bathe there, have a water source, have someone bring me packages of ramen to make, I could even shit and pee right there forever, a perfect ecosystem, for the rest of my life, and not ever have to go anywhere or outside again. That worked just fine for three or four days, except for the ramen because I didn’t have any, so I just drank a lot of water from the faucet instead, and then Josh’s younger brother Paul drove down from Santa Barbara, banged on the front door for a while, then decided to break through the bathroom window to come get me.
He made me get out of the terrarium-tub, and then he decided to stay the night, just to make sure I was okay. He was a sophomore at UC Santa Barbara, studying biology or pre-med or something. Josh had shown me photos of his brother. Paul was seven or eight years younger and unripe-looking, a laundered sweatshirt and ironed jeans, a Josh’s kind of hair but combed and darker, a Josh’s face but paler, unvarnished. He looked just like the photos, but now he also looked scared, stunned. He got me towels and one of Josh’s clean T-shirts and made me take a shower, which seemed ridiculous, given that I’d been living in a bathtub for four days, but fine. When I came out he told me not to worry about anything, that everything had been taken care of, their parents had had Josh’s body brought home to Ventura. They’d wanted to find me, have me come for the service, but I’d never answered the phone. They’d always liked me. They thought I was a stabilizing influence on their wandering son. That I could root him. Now they were worried that I was all right. So after the service, because there wasn’t time before, Paul had driven down to check. He could stay a few days, he said, then drive back up. I said okay. He’d found sheets and a pillow for the couch. He asked me if I wanted to go out for pizza or something. I looked outside the living room window, at the ugly, treacherous, stolen cholla cactus in the front yard. It had beaten me, gotten me back. I’d stolen Josh, too, and the cactus had punished me for both of them. No, I told Paul, I really didn’t feel like going out.