“But you returned that night, didn’t you?” Mason says. “You went back determined to destroy the lipstick formula.”
I turn from the weeping admission and look out my window. The chemistry of industrial espionage is contained in these pale wastes, in layers of the ancient sea. Sonny claims the Japanese are expecting to take uranium out of here, and are being fleeced. Fuck integrity, eh? Elementary. But is this place as lifeless as it looks? There might be secrets here just waiting to be looked for, a primeval rectitude I can’t even guess at.
I built a fire my first night, roasting sweet potatoes in the embers, and wondered who the unfamiliar light would attract. I was expectant, not fearful, peering into watery shadows. But it was something I heard rather than saw that taught me right off to respect this place. Wet wind put out the flames of my fire as though aimed. The slow prefatory scraping was like two algae-covered slabs pulling apart, and then came a sound both mechanical and animal, an admonitory rumble and roar that had me crouching in the illusory safety of the pod, reduced. I stayed awake while the sky shifted from black to blue, without hearing so much as an elf owl, and this gravid silence was worst of all.
Try as I might, I could not keep myself from interpreting the experience, could not in the now ominous daylight hold down the conviction that my choices were to leave and be doomed or to stay and be absorbed. I felt as though I were being closely examined from above like something in a petri dish. When I said before that I took things lightly, I lied. But you must be used to that by now. In cities where I have lived, candor makes licit all sins: Go ahead and fuck me around, just be honest about it. So, in the current style, I could wrap things up by confessing to solipsism. But a swindle is a swindle. This is what I mean by the doom that awaits me everywhere but here.
Inside my pod there are seeds. I fold down the writing desk, align pencil and paper. What am I going to put down? A grocery list? A letter? Do I want to draw heads or play hangman with myself? Outside a thousand absorptive processes are taking place. Leaves suck sun and make sugar. Maggots take nutrition from pus. I am still wary, still uncomfortable. But at last I have something to write.
Q: Are we not men?
A: No, we are animals
All the consoling fabrications must be waived.
46
THE MARGIN FOR ERROR is thin. Beware of moods. Ignore quick decisions. Balance, proportion. I learn to walk all over again, canting forward on the lead foot for a gradual transfer of weight. I learn to conserve energy. Information shaped like an arc, my eyes sweeping back and forth across the steadiness of the landscape. Caution, deep cover. I learn to recognize danger signs.
A dust devil swirls off to my right, then replicates itself close by. Light has muted, the temperature is dropping, and the smell of ozone is sharp. Storms blow up fast with so few obstacles in their way. Home is a good half mile away, but the spiraling of larger wind doesn’t hurry me, nor the first distant lightning, a yellow crack on three branching legs like a music stand. Time is a broad generality. Water is a gift. Seeds long dormant will sprout; brine shrimp will breed in puddles.
Hard and fat, the first raindrops make my skin draw tight. Tiny craters appear in the dust and splattered rocks darken. I’ve sighted the Airstream now, a hunk of metal in a wide open space, a target. One speedy bolt could leave me crisped in there like a strip of bacon, but I’ll take that chance. The elements — everything falling off the periodic table at once. Hunched under a drenching roar, I move toward shelter like a man crossing a battlefield.
Enclosed, I wrap up in a blanket and roll a cigarette. Rain pounds unrhythmically, winds burst, but my silver shell is riveted tight, no rattles or leaks, solid on its blocks. In a few weeks I have become intimate with its every rib and seam. I pass my hand over some irregularity, comforting as the moles on a lover’s back, and feel sound. Firing up the stove, throwing black tea in a cup, I remember the gift of water and fly out the door with jars and pans, anything that will catch some. An edict of water, a decree. I spread my fingers and they’re like ten little faucets dripping. Stripping useless clothes, I squeeze them into a bucket already half full. I’m blind, as though standing under a waterfall, but not so entranced as to ignore my own advice: Come away from your senses, boy, before you get swallowed.
Strong tea and stale biscuits, a candle on the floor. Slowly, I go through my scavenge bag, the pickings of the day. One bleach jug, with cap. Five more brass rifle shells (soon I’ll hang them all for wind chimes). A roach clip dropped by some dirt biker. Baling wire, no rust. Crow feathers. Not all that bad, considering I never reached the road. Simple rules and small tasks keep me on my good behavior.
Still, old habits die hard. It is not enough to follow the progress of a wolf spider as I once did the sequence of postwar Italian cinema. In fact, it is too much. The student is at a remove, his curiosity a kind of heartless filtration. The further he evaluates, the further he lengthens his distance. The miser of knowledge never will merge. I know all about this. I could accept the accidental and the immutable both, but I kept trying to tell the difference. Humbug. Utility? A niche in the system? Learn to think with the blood.
I put out some pinto beans to soak. These legumes contain bacteria that take nitrogen from the air and inject it into their host soil. Today I found more evidence of cactus rustlers in the area. They drive out from the city in pickups and carry off chollas and saguaros sometimes twice their age to decorate the walkways of a condo high-rise, or to make the centerpiece in a florist’s window, strung with colored lights at Christmas. I might ask Sonny to lend me one of his guns.
The storm has nearly passed, a few plops on my roof, thunder muffled like a hostage in the cellar. The thinning air is laced with odors sweet and sour that rain has caused to bloom. Guiltily, I look for a rainbow. There is a rim of heavy mist round the horizon, but nothing more. I remember driving with Andrea up the coast to Mendocino, driving into one end of a cloudburst and out the other. There was a double rainbow, its farthest ends disappearing into the sea. I parked the Olds near a steep drop and we got out. Freshly emerged sun made everything glow. I went into the details of diffraction and spectral density.
“You”—Andrea, as usual, let everything show in her eyes—“you are a book-fed pig.”
Then she snatched the car keys and pitched them over the side.
No fresh sun here, and the only thing glowing is the candle on the floor. I have emptied as many rain containers as possible into the storage drum and covered the rest to keep out debris, protecting nameless banes leeched out of the sky from careless gnats, the odd crumb of drifting bark. Now I am sitting by the door in my director’s chair, empty and alert. Evening seems reluctant to come, but I’m in no great hurry. The storm has passed and all I see is safely illegible.
47
ROY ROGERS’ COOK HAD a jeep named Nellybelle. That’s all I can think of as this one comes at me across the sand, even after I spot the whip antenna and the painted emblem on the door. The closer it gets, the slower it seems to travel.
I have the sun at my back and a kitchen knife in my hand. He has the tall hat and the silver star. He knows my name.
“You aware you’re on private property?”