“Resources,” he kept muttering.
Why the opacity? Why now? Could it be no more than the usual clog of jargon and cross-purposes? I thought not. I pictured Violet field-tripping past, brisk in sandals and shorts. Overwhelming her face would be the heavy, black-framed sunglasses of a Communist film critic; dangling from her white neck like a piece of life-support equipment would be the ubiquitous Pentax; between her toes would be calcareous grit millions of years old. And Violet would be no more out of place than a centipede.
No, this spate of bad reception between Sonny and myself, our mouths moving around static, must emanate from a source both less and more fundamental.
“How you go about this ought to be your own business,” he said.
We slackened, sat next to each other, touching at the knee. This was better, wiser. Not talking, we could be as placid as two Kool penguins.
He has promised to return before dark with a pair of tenderloin steaks. A gesture? A stance? I bewilder myself, turning over suspicions of my last link of a friend, pettily resenting his sustenance. I have nothing that needs to be guarded so selfishly. Still and all, this is not a venture and I’m not looking for partners.
Sonny has a new parabolic dish antenna which he wants to bring out here for me. It is enormous in his hard rutted yard, a pulsating ear with the delicate, blossomy contours of something formed by wind. It is a mechanical extrapolation of the omnivorously versatile human, unable to adapt and so bound to subdue, to capture and control even the air. And, Sonny fervently believes, it is a crucial tool for whatever I am trying.
The free life (not what I’m trying) means noise. Countless signals vie for attention — in one ear, out the other, on to the next ear — signals that in this zone fracture and bend, fly blind, fade in and fade out, that shower magically like particles from a child’s divinely smiling planet. Tenderness, fury, amazement. Trial by jury, soccer from Oslo, the cross-talk of pilots. I can have all this in a dish, signals needing no answer, muddy music of the spheres. This is the intrusive gift Sonny wants to bring me. I discourage him as firmly as possible, but he’s made it a focal point and hangs on. No compromise. His faithful insistence is liable to crowd me toward something drastic. A matter of preservation, and, probably, another row of spines on my penitent’s crown.
Through my pitted window I see lowering clouds shot through with evening tans and coppers. Stepping outside, I come instantly against a vibratory wall composed of nothing measurable, no sawtooth waves launched from towers, bounced off orbiting metalware, but rather of inaudible, invisible motion, the chemically dictated formations of the mass.
Evening light curves listlessly away while a breeze wraps me tightly and the silence of the desert transmutes into the silence of our house on Windsong Terrace. Inside an air of desertion are separate traces of the family, burnt coffee, sweet grass, chlorine from a pool. The silence is pressing and it seems dangerous to move, to climb the stairs and pluck the fruits of Carla’s laundry basket. So a motionless son squints into the melancholia of summer and wonders about other sons moving from room to room, bludgeoning anyone they find. Is it the cool silence that they want all to themselves? Take command. Be the son of whom nothing more is ever said.
Those darkening hills, hot mud cooled before it could puddle, are closer than they look, but there aren’t any illusions in the land they enclose. I recall a man from that era of silence in our house, of misapplication and bland, lonely bike rides, a man, named after a freshwater baitfish, who compared television content to “a vast wasteland.” Such a man would be as oblivious to the furious life of the desert as to the explosive collision of disaster film and cat food commercial. He would be the valuable son, the example forever cited, and certain he had so much to lose that fear would rule him.
“Business has never been better,” Sonny says, cupping his hands over the fire. “Those nuclear survival maps, where we pinpoint the twenty safest areas of the country? We can’t keep the damn things in stock.”
His entrepreneurial glow, reinforced by wine, is overbright. With scattered stars and a new moon, darkness beyond the rim of the fire is like a barrier you could crack your face against.
“We’re doing an all-new catalog. Fifty pages, offset printing. Pro all the way.”
His belt jangles with keys and useless little tools.
“There’s pressure out there. People are feeling it and that’s good for you.”
“Pressure? Population increases geometrically and food supplies increase arithmetically. That’s pressure, my friend.”
Citizen Sonny has been reading Malthus. I find this disquieting.
“Anyone who’s hungry for more than food, they ought to call it a privilege,” he says.
He stretches lazily like a lizard scratching its back, a lizard replete with small bugs. And it’s thanks to him that I have fresh supplies, a tub of peanut butter, sacks of beans and rice, that I’m picking strands of meat from between my teeth with a peeled, bone-white stick. Yes, Sonny, protein runs the world. Ethics, rights, liberty — these are leisure pursuits.
“When I start to think of the things I’ll never see and the stuff I’ll never find out…” He looks out and down, as if for a caption.
“Just stop talking,” I say somewhat recklessly. “Stop filling my head with reruns.”
He spits into the coals. “Poor Sonny,” Sonny says. But he’s quiet after that.
I understand that appeal has been coming from him all along. And I think I understand that he has no more idea than I do of what the appeal is for. More miscellaneous signals, noise from another disappointed son. The best I can do is forgive the intrusion. The most I can do is nudge him toward home, toward the loyal eyes of his children and the resigned arms of his wife.
He grips me like a priest, winces with goodwill. “You gonna be all right.”
It is neither a question nor a statement, only a small collection of sounds.
We push cold mist in front of us as we walk, mist we will find condensed on the chrome of Sonny’s four-by-four, squeezed down to its heavier essence. We walk in the long shaft of Sonny’s flashlight until, chuckling, he snaps it off. Even then I can make out the strip of his bumper, white Gothic letters, one word: BLESSED. Sonny inserts the ignition key slowly, as though apprehensive of a wired bomb. Gold eyes flash and a low shape wheels away when he clicks the headlights on. Exhaust hangs in the air, condensing on my skin.
49
HAWKS RIDE HIGH ON the thermals, drifting in lazy loops. Their wing adjustments are so slight, their head swivels so quick, and they can spot a rodent’s eyes from so far. But for now they’re only passing time, floating under the sun.
I sip frugally from the canteen, just enough to smooth the burr at the back of my throat. Wouldn’t want to run short on a day like this, have to make it through to sunup, when I could lick dew. This air is so thin and dry that it seems to become powder in the lungs. Sweat disappears in an instant, leaving the pores tight. Kalahari bushmen bury water in empty ostrich eggs along their routes of travel. Saharan nomads drink the urine of their camels. Specialization comes easily to a man without choices, and tends to elude those whom choice has covered like the measles. So we consult texts, carry compasses, shield our eyes behind darkened plastic. And we sip frugally.
According to my compass, a northeasterly diagonal will lead me home. This feels wrong, but I must rely on instruments. My head is a heavy melon and my blurring eyes might be etched with dark spirals like the props of a hypnotist. Far too easy to become a subject of this flat land of mirage. Like right now. What I take for a watchful man couldn’t be more than a slender branching bush. I’ll be seeing Rommel in his command car next.