There are plenty of good reasons to find yourself in Virginia City. The first time we came, we came because Jules wanted to stand in the spot where Mark Twain stood. She wanted to see what Mark Twain saw. Danny and I watched her. She stood on that plank walkway, quiet and reverent, looking out over the foothills, searching for something. I’d never seen her like that, before or since. There was none of that reverence in the chapel and it seems now that there should have been. Yes, today is a day for reverence, for some goddamn sincerity of emotion. I’m drunk. When did today become that day?
Jules comes close to a flush, and calls us over for luck. We each put a finger on the red plastic draw button. This is our ritual. How many times have we layered our three hands atop the last card, stacked our fists like totems on the lever of a slot machine, laid our hopeful fingertips on one last deal?
Danny says, Wait. He pops a maraschino cherry into his mouth, then one into Jules’s. Her teeth glow pink with cherry brine. Poor sweet Danny. We can’t help who we love.
The wind blows a swarm of golden mesquite leaves inside. Jules says, “One. Two. Three.”
The queen we needed winks up at us. The payout is close to four hundred dollars.
Jules and Danny scream and throw their arms around each other. They slap the bar. They say, Fuck, yeah. They say, You like that? I’m feeling severe. Danny stands on his stool and fishes the last olive from the bin. He is less and less himself these days. He holds the olive in front of Jules, the juice dribbling down his wrist. She reaches for it gleefully but he pulls it away and slips it into his mouth.
“We should cash out,” I say.
Danny only smiles, revealing the little plug of olive pinched between his teeth. Jules laughs that helium laugh of hers and takes Danny’s face in her hands. She presses her mouth to his. I watch. I expect their kiss to be urgent and ambitious but they’re unhurried, dreamy. She moans gently as he arches her back against the bar. He slips one hand under her shirt and holds his whiskey in his other, like he’s been doing this his whole fucking life. Afterward, he’s slack-jawed and electric eyed and Jules munches happily on whatever is left of their olive. “We should cash out,” I say again.
Jules mumbles, “Yeah,” and at the same time Danny says, “Fuck that,” and taps deal again.
“What are you doing?” I say.
He laughs and says, “Having fun.”
“No.” I grab his wrist. “Cash out.”
Jules says, “Hey, hey.”
“Get off me,” says Danny. A bit of whiskey slops onto his shirt. He pries my hand from his arm. “This isn’t about you.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “You. Me. Nothing she does means anything. Tell him, Jules.”
The machine blinks below us. Jules looks at me pityingly. The little mesquite leaves are whirling in the doorway like insects hungry for light. Suddenly there is that sincerity I thought I’d never see again; there is a glimpse of that foothill searching. “Don’t do this,” she says softly. A tiny golden leaf flutters and lands on her cheek.
“Do what you want,” I say. “You don’t mean anything to me.” I walk outside, wishing it were true.
It seems impossible that it’s still daylight but here is the sun, reaching behind my eyes, stinging the place where cords meet brain, where meaning is made out of light and the absence of light. I need to sober up.
Last year, the day after Halloween, we came to Virginia City. Danny wanted to go to church. “It’s Sunday,” was all he said. Jules and I teased him about this, because Sunday didn’t mean a damn thing to us. But we went, telling ourselves we were going for the same reason we did anything back then, for the fuck of it. We walked along the gravel road to Saint Mary’s, bumping into each other, trying to kick the same rock out in front of us, pretending nothing had happened, that nothing would ever happen.
Inside, the church was eerie quiet and smelled like melted wax. Danny put a dollar in the box and crossed himself. He showed us where to kneel and how to touch the soft tip of our longest fingers to our heads and hearts and shoulders. The sun came through the stained glass and it was warm and so beautiful. In the light Mary was weeping in yellows and blues and Jesus was weeping in reds and one guy was holding a big key and another half a loaf of bread and another a lamb. I didn’t know what that meant and still don’t. I wish I were Catholic. I remember kneeling, thinking, More of this. That’s all. That’s what I prayed for then: divine preservation of something I would never understand, the safeguarding of something I’d already lost.
I have to drive us home. I’m sick of Reno, sick of going to the same bars and seeing the same bands. I’m sick of eating the same two-dollar slices of pizza and buying the same sworn-off cigarettes from the same glass-faced machines. Sober up.
I can’t get us back, I know, but I wanted to have lost something that meant. Danny and Jules come outside as if summoned, blinking and bewildered. Jules says, “Iris.” It’s like I’ve never heard her say my name before. How tender it sounds coming from her. How pitiful.
I say, “I need to walk.” We stagger through Virginia City, against the wind. The commotion in town has subsided. It’s cold.
There’s a fence around the cemetery. We climb it. Danny trips and stumbles in the dirt. He takes Jules’s hand and helps her over. The graves here are old; lots of them are babies’ graves. I’m sorry for everything, even the things that had nothing to do with me. Especially those. We weave up the hill through the headstones, calling out deaths to each other like we’re trying to find our way in a storm.
“Consumption.”
“Scarlet fever.”
“Flu.”
“Pneumonia.”
“Consumption.”
“Whooping cough.”
“Childbed.”
“Consumption.”
“Cholera.”
“Drowned.”
“Consumption.”
There are plenty of good reasons to find yourself in Virginia City, if you need one. It used to be people came for the silver, but the silver’s long gone. In summer we come for the swap meet, for the camel races, for the cheap DVDs and the overweight belly dancers and the figures etched in crystals by lasers. For the gray-haired Indian who wears a feather headdress and who for a dollar will let you take a picture with the old fucked-up-looking panther he keeps chained to the back of his truck. There are plenty of good reasons to find yourself in Virginia City, but there’s only one reason. We came to time-travel.
From the top of the hill we can see the whole town and the valley and the debris hills beyond. I love that. Danny sits on a thick square headstone, his legs swinging softly in the dusk. Jules sits beside him. She puts her head on his shoulder like he’s always been there. Like the three of us have always been right here. I feel the last three beers resting like silver nuggets in the bottom of my purse. Below us glow the blue-orange flames in the lamps along Main Street. We drink and watch the sun dissolve into the Sierras, and for a small sparkling moment, we are who we once were.
GRACELAND
for Delilah
All the great land mammals are dying. There were once birds the size of sheep. Pinnipeds used to be huge; walruses had tusks six feet long. Jackrabbits had feet like two-by-fours. Armadillos were as big as minivans. Now, they are all dying off. African elephants are going thirsty, having to dig wells in the dirt with their trunks to find water. Bengal tigers are shot and skinned. Polar bears are drowning. Imagine! The world’s largest carnivorous land mammal drowning, an entire species drowned to extinction. You know what’ll be the largest land carnivore after we’ve shot all the tigers and drowned all the polar bears? The grizzly bear. Which is to say, some mornings I wake up before the alarm goes off and just lie there and think how I’m not sure I want to live in a world where the largest carnivorous land mammal is the goddamn grizzly bear. Peter tells me I have a sweet misunderstanding of the theory of natural selection. But then, he has also said that he finds my cartoon science very sexy.