This line of thought leads me down the path of Ellery Simpson’s mother and I picture Ellery’s heavy eyebrows and brown eyes from the photo on an older woman lying in bed in a darkened room with her fist to her mouth. I know from one of the work-studies that Ellery has a younger sister and brother and I wonder if that makes any difference and of course not how could it, how could anything. There’s the math of it, two being more than zero, but this is capitalist thinking—my mind somewhat hysterically conjures Hugo. And I still live in the universe of a single child where the idea of reproducing that love, the same dimension and volume of it, twice, three times, seven times, ten times, is incomprehensible although it is an irrefutable fact of life. I start crying. Eventually I stop and I hear that Honey has stopped too and now I feel lonesome for her and in a while I go back into the house back into the closet and get her out of the Pack ’n Play, her body heavy and limp. I hitch up onto the big bed and lean against the pillows with her head on my chest, feeling her back rise and fall with her curly head in the place on my neck. We stay like this for a while in the nearly pitch-black room with me just trying to transmit love to her until I put her back gently into the Pack ’n Play and return to the porch where I smoke three cigarettes in a row staring into the dark, ranging my fingers over my face and into my scalp and picking away at anything that feels remotely like a flake or a protuberance and feeling both not good and good at the same time.
DAY 3
We are finally going to call Engin. I put Honey in her stroller and we start the long walk down the highway that is also the main street leading out to the bird refuge at the far side of town. The sky is not so blue today as it was yesterday—it has a yellow tint and it is hot hot hot even at 9:45 when we hit the road after four stories and more pancakes. You think of heat having mass when it is humid but extremely dry heat has mass too unless you’ve got a good breeze or some shade, it is something you have to move against. Here and there I try to point out things to Honey—“there is the school where your grandma went” “there is the Elks” “that used to be a pharmacy” “that used to be the Tog-Shop” etc.—but once she is in the stroller her eyes basically glaze over and she lives in a strange place between sleep and awakeness but I’ll take it because I can basically think my thoughts and just be with her without having to do anything for her.
There aren’t very many open businesses on Main Street anymore, except the High Desert Hotel and the Frosty and the Rite Aid which is only a few years old and sure enough has annihilated the two mom-and-pop pharmacies that had coexisted peacefully for decades. The Frosty has a sign rising high up over the plains like a forlorn palm tree. Just past the sign my phone buzzes as we wander into a patch of service, and I see a voice mail icon, which fills me with dread. But I tap and there is only one and when I hold the phone to my ear I register that it is the voice of Uncle Rodney, who is the least threatening person who could be leaving me a voice mail at this moment. I stop to marvel at how quickly the frayed grapevine of my Altavista life has communicated to him that I’m in the house. John must have called Rosemary must have called Rodney. “Heard from Rosemary you were up at the house,” he says on the voice mail sure enough. “Give me a call and let me know how it’s looking, when you get the chance.” I know this will be relatively painless but I decide I don’t have the energy.
The sidewalks are completely empty except for a little group of youngish people in big T-shirts and short shorts for girls and big shorts for boys. Three kids are white and two are brown and I wonder if this is indicative of demographic change. There was one lone black family in town when Mom and Uncle Rodney were growing up but I don’t know what became of them. The kids move slow and laugh among themselves and Honey and I pass them and I give a little wave which yields a murmur of “Hi”s. We walk all the way through town to the Desert Sunrise, which is the Indian casino which is three conjoined trailers with slot machines and a few poker tables inside. I took Engin there on his inaugural trip to Altavista because I wanted him to see something he’d never seen before and I’d never seen the Desert Sunrise myself but it’s not like Las Vegas or even Reno where you can visit a casino if you aren’t gambling—there are about six grim-looking men and women at the Desert Sunrise, and everyone stares. Engin fancies himself a man of the people and gets into involved conversations I suspect he secretly regrets with old men and aunties in Anatolian gas stations but the Desert Sunrise does not create an atmosphere of folksiness so much as one of incipient murder. So we moonwalked out of the trailer and I noted the “Silly faggot dicks are for chicks” bumper sticker in the parking lot.
I reflect on Engin’s first visit to Altavista that Christmas with Rodney and Helen. Engin I think made certain assumptions about my class background which combined with certain assumptions that any foreigner has about what America is, which are no less bizarre and misguided than any American’s assumptions about what another place is, led him to believe that a trip to my ancestral land would be something like the movie Father of the Bride, even though I tried to prepare him by using words like “village” and “cowboy” when I described the town. When he first came to California and we got married in Uncle Rodney’s backyard in Quincy first we went up the Sonoma coast and then took 128 back inland through the golden country which if you squint looks Mediterranean and then we went inland to 49 up the Yuba and the Downie and the majestic forests and the stone peaks of Lassen and then into the green valley around Quincy and Quincy itself with its beautiful false fronts and historic theaters and the sound of water wherever you go and I could tell wherever we went that he got it. But then you get up in the north and east and things just get a little scrubbier, the buildings flatter and the people less likely to have started a playhouse with a free library out front. The beauty here is the great slate sky the sound of the birds in the morning the color of the hills and the fields at dusk. Engin said it reminded him of Ang Lee. But I told him that’s not accurate, since Ang Lee trucks in the maximalist blue-sky beauty of Montana or Wyoming, blowsy hills like big green breasts, not the high, thin, stony West, full of volcanic stone washes and scrub oak. Then he pointed out that Brokeback Mountain was actually filmed in Canada and I said “How do you even know that” and he said “I googled it because I liked the scenery” and I laughed. Engin loves vistas.
When Honey and I hit the turnoff for the Desert Sunrise we turn back around in order to find Wi-Fi to Skype with our Ang Lee fan and thus we find ourselves at Sal’s Café in the lobby of the High Desert Hotel on Main Street. It’s open and populated by two tank-topped blond white teen girls at one table and a very, very old white woman with a gray bob who sits at another with a cup of coffee staring vacantly ahead. I buy a coffee from the proprietress maybe Sal herself and unpack Honey from her stroller and take a banana from the bag and squeeze it into pieces and she begins shoveling them into her mouth and I set up the laptop. I open Skype and put on the headphones but then realize Honey won’t be able to hear so I will just have to be rude and let him talk to the room. I click Engin’s face and it rings and he answers and there he is in the flesh or in the screen rather, his gray eyes pale skin brown hair and his newly clean-shaven face and I think how handsome he is and instead of feeling happy and proud I feel a pang because he has been unattended for eight months looking like that and I am here looking like this and then I remember that he is on the shorter side and his arms are also the tiniest bit too short for his body and maybe that will keep the women away and then I think God should just smite me we haven’t even exchanged three words.