Sandro had told me about one of Helen Hellenberger’s artists who had done a drawing by walking in a straight line across a mile of the Mojave Desert and marking it in chalk. It was almost feminine, Sandro joked, to walk. Contemplation, nature, submitting passively to the time it took.
The time it took: that was when I had gotten the idea to do this. What about going as fast as you possibly could? I’d thought. And not marking it in chalk. Drawing in a fast and almost traceless way.
* * *
I’d spent half a day among those waiting on death and now I was in line for the long course and hoping I was not the sacrifice.
Perhaps because I was one of the few women running a vehicle that day, the timing officials let me store my knapsack and camera with them while I did my run. Everyone loved the bike. It was brand-new, there was a waiting list to order them from every dealership in the United States. Even the Valera people came over to admire it. I didn’t explain that I was Sandro’s girlfriend. I simply let them admire the bike, or admire the idea of an American girl riding it. Didi Bombonato was not among the Valera people who came over to say hello, see the bike. Didi Bombonato was in the air-conditioned bus. He would make his run later, when the salt was closed to everyone else.
No bump vehicle? The timing official asked me.
Street bike, I said, with electric start.
They would mark my time at two miles, but I was planning to sustain it for longer. For the entire ten miles, and so I had lots of time and space to get up to top speed. I wanted to feel the size of the salt flats. When I’d requested the long course instead of the short course, the timing association secretary had asked if my vehicle went over 175 miles an hour. I lied and said yes, and she shrugged and put an L next to my name.
It had rained recently, which was why everyone’s tires were ringed in salt. The salt was still rain-damp and sticky, which meant I’d leave tracks to photograph after my run.
Take it easy, the timing official told me. We’re expecting wind gusts. At mile three the course gets funky for several hundred feet, didn’t get completely smoothed out when they graded. He was kind. He didn’t belittle me for being a woman. He gave the pertinent information and then nodded that it was okay to go.
I was reminded, as I prepared to accelerate out of the start, of ski racing, and the many hundreds of moments I’d spent counting down seconds in the timing shack, my heart pounding, hunched at the start on the top of a course, squeezing the grips of my ski poles, planting and replanting them for the kick out of the start, surrounded by timing officials — always men, all men, but who took me seriously, spoke gravely about the imperfections of the course, what sorts of dangers to watch out for, a courtesy they gave every racer. At Bonneville, the sensations at the start were almost identical, the officials’ neutrality, the same people who surely had made this course, painted its three oil lines, dragged graders up and down it behind trucks, just as the officials at ski races prepped the course surface and set the gates. The beep of timing equipment, waiting to trip a red wire suspended over white. And the quality of light, pure reflecting white, like a snow-glinting morning above tree line.
Beep, beep, beep. I was off.
I moved through the gears and into fifth. The wind pushed against me, threatening to rip my helmet off, as though I were tilting my face into a waterfall. I hit 110 on my speedometer and went low. The salt did not feel like a road. I seemed to be moving around a lot, as if I were riding on ice, and yet I had traction, a slightly loose traction that had to be taken on faith. I was going 120. Then 125. I felt alert to every granule of time. Each granule was time, the single pertinent image, the other moment-images, before and after, lost, unconsidered. All I knew was my hand on the throttle grip, its tingling vibration in my gloved fingers: 130, 138. Floating Mountain hovered in the distance, a mirage at its skirt. Hazy and massive. Whatever happened, it would watch but not help. Pay attention, it said. You could die.
The trucker had said it more or less, telling me I’d look worse in a body bag. Probably I’d passed him, my loud exhaust pipes catching him off guard.
My left hand was cramping from tension. I slowed to 120 and lifted it off the grip, steering with my right hand. I felt the wind through my deerskin glove, heavy and smooth like water. Wind gets thickest just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier. The sound barrier is nothing but air, an immense wall of wind. Was wind one thing or a thing of many parts, millions or billions of parts? It was one thing, one wind. My two hair braids had worked themselves free from under my jacket and were flapping behind me, stinging my back like two long horse’s tails.
The photographs would be nothing but a trace. A trace of a trace. They might fail entirely to capture what I hoped for, the experience of speed.
“You don’t have to immediately become an artist,” Sandro said. “You have the luxury of time. You’re young. Young people are doing something even when they’re doing nothing. A young woman is a conduit. All she has to do is exist.”
You have time. Meaning don’t use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don’t rush to meet it. Be a conduit. I believed him. I felt this to be true. Some people might consider that passivity but I did not. I considered it living.
I tucked in and pegged the throttle. The salt stretched out in front of me. I saw the real ambulance, there in case of accidents, parked along the side of the course. I was going 142 miles an hour now. Two oil lines painted on either side of me marked the track, with a third down the middle. I flew along the centerline. I was going 145 miles an hour. Then 148. I was in an acute case of the present tense. Nothing mattered but the milliseconds of life at that speed.
Far ahead of me, the salt flats and mountains conspired into one puddled vortex. I began to feel the size of this place. Or perhaps I did not feel it, but the cycle, whose tires marked its size with each turn, did. I felt a tenderness for them, speeding along under me.
A massive gust of wind came in. I was shoved sideways and forced down.
The bike skipped end over end. I slammed headfirst into the salt, a smack into white concrete. My body was sent abrading and skidding and slamming before flipping up and slamming down again. I almost crashed into my own salt-sliding motorcycle. We barely missed each other. I skidded and tumbled.
There’s a false idea that accidents happen in slow motion.
The crash test dummy careens into the steering column, the front end folds inward, car hood accordioned, glass showering up and then collapsing gracefully like those waterfalls at the casinos exploding into confetti. (“Confetti,” Sandro says, “confetti is hard almond candy. No one throws it. We say coriandoli, a more beautiful word anyway.”)
What happens slowly carries in each part the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden, irreversible. It means this: no going back.
I know the wind gusted and that I crashed.
What came after was slower, but I wasn’t there for it. The lights were out.
3. HE HAD COME A LONG WAY TO THAT MOMENT OF QUICK VIOLENCE,
to braining a German soldier with a motorbike headlamp, and then taking the soldier’s dagger, his pistol, his gas mask, no longer of use to him. Such a long way.
From a placid childhood that faced the African sea, in which every young boy’s game was a set of silhouettes against a clean division of water and sky, vast and limitless, a sea smooth and convex as a glassmaker’s bubble, stretching and welling as if the aquamarine water were a single molten plasma.