A long time passed, it seemed like, and I began to get worried about making it home before my mother started to suspect I was doing untoward things with Ricky. It was funny— he and I had been sleeping together for years by then and had learned to please each other with the efficiency of opening up a high-school locker, yet I was somehow convinced that my mother would remain oblivious to all of that as long as I was home by midnight. Midnight was the magical hour at which cheap girls did sleazy things, and I certainly wasn’t one of those, irrespective of the fact that I had sex with Ricky in a pool-hall bathroom only an hour before. So I began biting my nails and hoped that, in his empathetic way, he would sense that I wanted him to hurry.
Chris had left the car running and the radio on, with a Jimi Hendrix eight-track filling the conversational silence. At some point during All Along the Watchtower I did hear a noise that sounded like a shot. But it was not particularly jarring, because the sound was almost incidental amid the music, and could just as easily have been a car backfiring. You must remember, at that moment I thought Ricky was stealing from the register. I wasn’t listening for signs of violence, although it would be only minutes before my perception of that would change.
Soon after that Ricky came back out, and almost before he had the car door shut, Chris began driving. Their conversation seemed unremarkable, but then I heard a metallic click and looked over to see Ricky bent over in the front seat, unloading a handgun. Now, I knew Ricky knew how to shoot a gun. I did too, because once, a month or so before he punched Clinton, he had taken me to the shooting range and forced me to learn. The gun we used had been borrowed from Chris, and I had to assume it was the same one I was looking at now. But these circumstances were nothing like those, and I didn’t want to understand what I was seeing, so I said nothing. Since I had already determined Chris was lying about Ricky picking up his paycheck, and that Ricky was likely robbing an empty store, I chose to continue to believe the store had been empty. This would not be the last time I would find myself kneecapped by cognitive dissonance.
“But you went back to Ricky the next day,” everybody said later, “even after you witnessed all of that.” Yes, I did. I can’t defend that, except to say that I couldn’t fully undo in sixteen hours the image of Ricky I had developed over fourteen years. Jeff Owen’s body had not been found yet, because it was a Monday and Spectrum was closed, so that made it easier to remain in denial. I believe I thought that, once I saw Ricky again, the night before would reveal itself to be a strangely vivid dream—a surreal journey, sex in an odd location, a sense of dread and a sharp lingering hint of violence that ends with the dreamer feeling tremendously relieved to have woken up. I’d had dreams with each of those components before, all tossed together in random configurations. You probably have, too. It’s very easy for someone on the outside to say that if the love of their life suddenly climbed back into the car and emptied a handgun without explanation, that they would immediately seek safety, call 911 and report everything they had seen to the responding officer. And that attitude— that series of accusatory questions as to why I returned to Ricky the next day—presupposes that I knew how all of this would end. Of course, if someone had sat down with me once I returned to my mother’s house and laid out all the information that was later presented to a jury, I would have seen it all through a different lens. I certainly don’t blame that jury for convicting me. I would have convicted me, too.
I hope that sheds a bit of light on Ricky’s circumstances leading up to his crimes. I will write more when I have time.
At the Braille workshop I finally finish Guernica and file it away in the drawer marked COMPLETED. Shirley was pleased with it. When she closed her eyes and ran her fingers over my work, her softly lined face glowed with a satisfied smile. The only tactile drawing left to do is Spiral Jetty, which is very straightforward. I believe there’s merit in trying to capture the symbolism and feeling of great visual artworks in a tactile format, but there’s no sense in pretending it’s possible with this one. The textbook publisher has chosen it because it represents an important movement in modern art. I understand the reasoning, but I’ve been to Spiral Jetty and nothing that matters about it could be captured on a sheet of thick paper. Not the manner by which Smithson built it, with heavy equipment and vigorous outdoor work, capturing the entire process on film as the spiral took shape; not the wind or sun, nor the pink water that welled between the swirls of rock; not the feeling of remoteness, having driven out to this tiny peninsula for the sake of walking in a circle while breathing in the bracing, salty air. Ironically, out of all the artworks in the textbook, it’s surely the most accessible to anyone who can’t see—and yet it’s the only one for which I can’t make a decent representation for the blind. But it’s been buried under water for thirty years, so I suppose my drawing is the closest any blind person will get to it.
I sit down at the computer to work on some transcription. When we divide up the work at the beginning of a project, I’m always assigned the sections of the book that deal with my drawings, so I know what to expect. I open the file and begin copying it into the Braille software.
The building of Smithson’s earthwork took six days. It is 15 feet wide, 1500 feet in length, and is composed entirely of natural materials, including basalt rock, earth, water and salt crystals. Water levels were unusually low at the time of the Jetty’s creation, but within a few years a rise to the pre-drought levels left the piece submerged. More recently, however, a drop in the level of the Great Salt Lake has revealed the structure and made it walkable once again. Visitors have enjoyed experiencing the rebirth of the Spiral Jetty, and its reemergence raises many questions about the proper curation of such an ephemeral piece.
I stop and reread what I have typed. Then I turn and look at Shirley, who is standing at the desk beside mine tearing open a package from a publisher. “Have you heard that Spiral Jetty is visible again?”
“Have I heard the what?”
“The earthwork in the Great Salt Lake. It’s been buried almost my whole life, and now this book is saying it’s back.”
She shrugs, bouncing her white hair. “I don’t know anything about it.”
I scroll through the file, but it says nothing further. The only image is one of the Jetty when it was first built in 1970. I hesitate, then fold my hands in my lap and look at her with what I hope is my most reasonable, woman-to-woman expression. “Can I just… Do you think I could look it up on the internet? For research?”
She shoots me a sly look. “Clara. Really.”
“You can watch me the whole time. I just would like to verify that this is true. I had always heard that it was lost underwater, and it matters, you know, whether I’m drawing a lost artwork or one that’s accessible.”
“Why?” she asks, and I don’t reply because I have no answer to that. “It doesn’t matter one way or another. We’re not the editors. We just transcribe whatever they say, and if they said they found the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in a mall in Fresno, well then, heck, you go ahead and write it in Braille.”