On its surface, the ranch was rustic — it told the story of a Mexican hacienda, with small orange and pink casitas dotting the land around the main estate. When I first rode into the courtyard, my gameness for adventure had stuttered, as I imagined scratchy woven blankets and hard wooden chairs. But the antique touches were just for show. One layer down, everything here had been built for comfort.
Still, I couldn’t find sleep — still, despite my bed and its deep well of feathers, despite the crisp sheets. No matter how I arranged myself, I was too aware of my body. Tiny hairs crackling on the back of my neck. Ribs abutting stomach and spleen. The memory of a finger tracing a line down my back. I felt too alive, too touched to drift off.
And then there was the issue of my throat, that shadow shape.
Get out, I thought. But it sat firm, small bean. Silent passenger.
With a sigh, I sat up, holding the blanket around my shoulders. A window beside me allowed in streams of light where a triangle of curtain had been folded back — when? Finn had wanted to show me constellations. Finn had crept out in the morning, perhaps before the sun bled into the sky.
Outside nothing tempered the landscape. Cactus and rock, bone and tree, jutted from the earth where and how they wished. Contradictions refused explanation: the sky through my window was clear, but the sand was speckled with rainwater, the scent of which lay over the morning like a shawl. What are you doing here? The question came to me from the air. And I remembered.
The stage. A real reason, a good reason, to have come all this way. To have pushed and pulled John into a fight, and then tumbled down after him, much further than I expected to go.
I pulled on jeans and a long cotton shirt, hasty dress against the wind. My plan was simple, if vague: find the right path and reach my destination. If there was a path, that is. Knowing what I did about Finn, it was entirely possible that the stage was hidden and we’d need to be led there by some sort of native guide. He liked a show. Though at least he had no trouble admitting that. No hesitation about telling you what was a performance and what was real as breathing.
As luck would have it, I slipped outside without meeting anyone else in the hacienda. An hour later and the other guests would all have been out to waylay me. Polite hellos. Curiosity. I’d have had to look at their bodies and try to map the sensations in mine to possibilities in theirs. Like coded words being translated back to ordinary meaning.
A bruised lip. The strange heat on my thighs. My neck, cooler than usual where the wind hit it. And my hair, which felt tugged — my whole scalp loosened. My body raggedy and strange, and beautiful.
That’s what I felt, anyway, when I only read the pleasure.
Outside I looked around myself for some orientation. There was a promising path down by the fire pit, and lacking any greater insight, I began to walk it. I had an absconding schoolgirl feeling, of being alone when and where I shouldn’t. The roads on the ranch were just brushed dirt, so every step crunched beneath me like crackers in my teeth. But when I looked over my shoulder, no one was following my noisy footfalls. No one seemed to care where I was going.
Shadows fell from the mountains, but to the northwest the desert was already bathed in sun. Elevation changes were rumpled into the hills like clothing discarded on a bedroom floor. Around me everything looked identical and mischievous. Tall spiked spires covered in green leaves, flat paddle cacti spitting needles. If it hadn’t been for the path, I would have lost my way immediately in the blur of brush and flora. As it was, I had a difficult time believing that I was making any progress — indeed, that there was progress to be made. A stage, here? Would it sit on top of the boulders, or beside them?
Then I turned a corner and saw it.
The canyon narrowed, funnel-like, towards a passage that was fit only for rib-thin coyotes. In front of this passageway sat the stage that my agent had promised me, embraced by the canyon walls. Posts poked up from each corner like turrets, perhaps to support a canopy that hadn’t yet arrived. One half of the structure, still shaded by the overhanging rock, was wet with dew. And on the other side, in the sun, sat Finn. He had a hammer in his hand. A few nails scattered around his feet.
I stopped, surprised somehow to find him there. The stage was supposed to be for me. Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. Didn’t you want this? I brightened my face into a smile.
“Really?” I called out, hands cupped around my face to make a megaphone. “You’re building it by hand?”
But Finn didn’t seem any more delighted to see me than I was to see him. His face remained blank, officious, as thin wings of discomfort brushed against my neck. Perhaps he had come here specifically to be alone. Here, on his birthday, with his dawn thoughts. Perhaps we were the same in that way. A kinship, but not a fellowship, or a comfort.
My throat tightened up and I coughed.
“Sorry,” I said. The shape in my throat twitched, moved. Reshuffled. Finn just stared.
When I was a child, I used to play games, imagining myself transformed into a rabbit or a cat, urging my spine to flex out and my fingers to withdraw into paws with hot, dry pads where my palms had been. I hadn’t thought about those games in years, but now I felt the same urge bubbling up in me — to change and become unrecognizable. My arms might fuse to my sides, my legs harden into a single stalk. My body shift until only a hint of my head and neck remained — the suggestion of shoulders that cowboys leading trail rides would point to as a minor landmark. The lady cactus, the canyon ghost.
Finn looked down at his hands and, as if in afterthought, held a nail up to a board and hit it in. Three hits. Neat.
“Since you’re here, why don’t you sing me something?”
He didn’t glance up when he spoke, and so it took me a ridiculous moment to realize he was talking to me. But when I did, something inside me responded to the idea, as it always did. Loosening up, relaxing. Singing, after all, was simple. In that act I had no need to speak, or to remember the night before. I could simply disappear inside myself, go deep inside my body, my voice. Escape, for a short time, the weight of my life.
Become airborne.
I was thinking of the stringy skeleton of a saguaro cactus; Finn had pointed some out on our ride. He said that small animals bore inside the cacti to make hidden colonies, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking. But I liked the idea of birds nesting within me, moving through my bones. On the outside, my body would be a fortress, and inside I’d house an army of gilded flickers.
Well, that would be amazing, John’s reply came to me unbidden, and I heard also his sardonic laugh. The shape in my throat shifted.
“All right,” I called back to Finn, then walked to the stage. There was a stairway on the side, just four steps high. I walked skyward. “You want a preview?”
Finn shaded his eyes from the sun. “Equipment test, ma’am.”
The boards on the stage were unfinished. It was, I realized, a temporary structure. And no wonder — out here, the wood would degrade in the sun or end up nibbled to scraps by passing animals. Maybe, in time, it would become a nest.
Love is a rebellious bird — so says Bizet’s tragic heroine Carmen. She cries out: Love is a gypsy’s child who has never known the law. The bird you hoped to tame beat its wings and flew away. Just then John, at home in Chicago, was probably waking up for coffee. Using that same thick-bottomed mug he always liked, and washing it out so it would be ready again whenever he wanted it. He used to tease me that I sang like a sparrow, and when he did I’d hit him with things — pillows, a single shoe — because a sparrow has no range. Has no power.