The
only place He wanted to go was the desert. No matter how hard he tried
otherwise, the only place he could guide himself, the only place his steering
wheel and the cogs and gears and tubes of his car would take him was the
desert. Somewhere he would be able to take his shirt off and lay out across a
rock that would burn his back and leave blisters. Where the sun was unforgiving
and could force him to confront himself in ways he didn’t dare on his own. He
wanted to be a mouthpiece wandering through the chaos only to realize that the
message he’d been hearing all his life was his own. He desperately sought a
place where sin, degradation, and evil could be baked to dust and blown away on
a hot wind, instead of dripping from his shoulders and hair like a living
slime. A place where the impurities could be smelted down to something much
simpler, and much more valuable. A place where a center could be found, and
eventually abandoned once he realized that no center is needed in lives like
ours.
The sun was a hot rain falling on the car,
turning it to a tin oven and baking Him soft and hollow. The desert air roared
through the open windows but he couldn’t hear it over the thoughts fighting for
space in his head. Lives like ours..
His mind was scarred with possibility and
possibilities lost and he had no clue as to where time would lead him. Maybe it
wasn’t time leading him at all but just a vague sense of escape. A feeling of
running away from the losses and rejections of the past. The air in the tires
must be expanding in this heat, He thought as his eyes squinted down the
highway. I wonder if one will explode.
Joshua Trees flew by the open windows, a
landscape cutting around the car at eighty miles an hour. Just keep driving. If
a tire blows, walk. Run. Like a desert dog. The two lane road rolled out to the
horizon, flat and straight, calling to eternity and letting eternity call on
anyone desperate enough to drive this forgotten stretch. Eternity slithered
down the highway and crept into his mind to crawl around and make him crazy,
but retreated as quickly as it came, frightened by the chaotic, jumbled musings
of desolation and angst. As close as is possible to imagine a snake limping is
how eternity made it’s way back down to the horizon. Back to some kind of
voiceless void. Run, desert dog.
He
shook his head against the weariness that was taking over his eyes only to
realize it was the heat haze steaming off the road that was blurring his
vision. He pulled to the side of the road and cut the engine and quiet fell.
The engine no longer rumbled, the wind through the open windows died away, even
his thoughts faded out for a moment. He got out and leaned against the car, the
hot blue metal stinging him through his t-shirt. He stood in the stillness and
quiet that had dropped around him and looked to the horizon. The heat was so
intense in this place that it had burned the blue out of the sky, leaving it a
bleached gray, only slightly lighter than the enormous and vague thunderhead
gathering far off to the east.
He lit a cigarette as he walked around the car
and down a small embankment at the road’s edge. He pulled drags at the
cigarette as he stood taking a long leak on the desert floor, thinking of the
puddle he was making, Maybe something will grow there. And next week it will be
dead from heat and thirst. As he zipped his jeans he thought he heard the
crunch of footsteps on sand and gravel over his shoulder. He bounded back to
the car and looked up the road in both directions but saw nothing. He finished
his cigarette and flicked it to the middle of the road and listened hard. For a
brief moment he was sure he could hear footsteps, but the barren echoes of the
desert confused him as to where they were coming from, but then the footfalls were
wiped away entirely by the sound of a car coming up the wilted distances of the
highway.
He
sat in the passenger seat looking out over the desert, listening to the sound
of the approaching car, which never seemed to get any closer. He couldn’t tell
if it was the approaching car that was stuck in some kind of highway limbo, or
if it were himself, but he didn’t care. He could have pulled off the road into
a rip in the universe and he was sure it wouldn’t have bothered him in the
least.
A
rattling pick-up truck crested the horizon, wavering like a dream from the past
in the heat from the road. He wasn’t sure that the heat and lack of sleep and
water wasn’t making him hallucinate so he regarded the truck with a suspicious
half-attention. Bouncing back at him from rock walls he couldn’t find were
echoes of the truck’s tires on the road that interfered with the actual noise
of the truck reaching his ears. The result was a disorienting ripple of sound
that throbbed in the furthest back part of his brain. He smiled.
The
truck looked as if it were going to speed past him, but at the last moment came
to a near screeching halt before him. Out of the window leaned a face that
looked like it was made from and old suitcase. A smile formed on its lips,
stained off-white pearls set against skin the color of the desert itself, with
the same texture. “You having car trouble?”
“No,”
He squinted against the sun reflecting out of the driver’s eyes. “Just taking a
break from driving.”
“OK,
then, just making sure.” The old man leaned further out the window, conspiratorially
lowering his voice. “Between you and me, there’s a good looking girl walking
down the road back there a ways. I offered her a ride, but no such luck. Maybe
you’ll get luckier.” The old man winked.
“Maybe,”
He laughed politely. “But that’s the last thing I want or need right now. That’s
kind of why I’m out here.”
..That’s
too bad,” said the driver. “She’s a looker.” He looked over the desert and a seriousness
came about his face. “Big storm building over that way. Lots of storms are born
out here, and I’ve seen ‘em all.” The driver became silent, staring.
“You
live out here?”
The
old man came back to the present. “Me? Yeah, over fifty years. You might call
me something of an old desert dog.” He
looked back down the road and pointed. “But here comes your girl. I better get
going.” He laughed and waved, pulling forward slowly. “Good luck, boy.” The
truck rattled away to some desolate homestead.
He
lit another cigarette as he peered down the road, just barely seeing the
silhouette of a girl walking out of the heat shimmer. He leaned against the
car, listening to the crunch of the girl’s footsteps coming down the side of
the road. The cigarette was almost done when she arrived at his car, carrying a
duffle bag over her shoulder. He kept his eyes to the ground, letting the hot
wind carry the smoke away from his face in contorting whirls. She stopped in
front of him and stood in silence for several tense seconds before he glanced
up at her face.
“Hey,
can I get a ride?”
“But
I’m going the same way you just came.”
She
smiled like a lifelong friend. “That’s all right. That means I don’t have to
look at the scenery and I can get some rest.”
“I
don’t have air conditioning.” He offered.
“That’s
all right.” She walked around the car and presumptuously let herself in the
passenger door. He nervously slipped in behind the wheel and brought the car
back to life, easing it back on to the highway. “So,” she said. “What’s your
name?”
He’d
learned to carry himself with a certain loner-mystique, and people had drawn
parallels between himself and James Dean. I
don’t really know much about him was almost always his reply.
“When
I saw you standing by the car smoking I thought you looked like James Dean.”
She spoke with her head leaned back and her eyes closed. “Like his ghost was
wandering around out here in the desert or something.” Her hair flew in the
wind and he thought it looked like arcs of black electricity crackling around
her head.
“I
guess there are worse people I could remind you of.” He smiled and turned his
eyes to her, really looking at her for the first time. He was amazed that she
hadn’t ended up as some kind of statistic on this lost highway. He wasn’t absolutely
certain that he wouldn’t yet turn her into one. This is a thing of mistakes and
wonder, he thought. “You’re beautiful,” is what he spoke. “Like Natalie Wood.”
She turned her brown eyes to meet his, but he
was watching the road again. She smiled to herself and repeated, “Like Natalie
Wood.” She closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep.
A thing of mistakes and wonder. One leads to
the other and vice versa. She’ll get close and I’ll get hurt. He gently turned
the wheel to avoid the carcass of a desert jackrabbit that was splayed out
across the road. The rabbit’s innards were a mess upon the asphalt, but, even
at the speed he was traveling, for a split second he imagined he could see life
in its eyes. Like a pleading, a begging for release from the peace of death. He
drove through the heat haze not knowing where he was going, or where he was
taking Her.
She
took a rolled up twenty out of her pocket and paid for his cigarettes. “Here,
let me cover it.” She handed him the change. “Fair’s fair, since you paid for
the gas and all.”
“I’d
be paying for gas even if you weren’t with me. The cigarettes, too.” He folded
the bills and slipped them into her pocket. “Thanks, though.”
As
they pulled away from the gas station he asked, “What are you running from?” He
lit a cigarette with a match, the flame of which hardly even wavered in the
wind rushing through the car. “Or to?” He added.
“I
don’t think I can be sure on that, anymore. I’m just kind of running. Away from
a lot. Toward a lot. Toward everything, I guess. I’m just running away like I’ve
wanted to since I was a little girl.”
“Can
I run away with you?.” He asked. “I’m pretty certain I went nuts today and I’m
running away from that, among other things.”
“Since
we’re both running I don’t see the harm in running away together.”
“OK,” He said. “I’ll keep driving, you just tell me
where to go. Maybe we’ll find something worth stopping for, eventually.”
“Maybe,”
She said. “And, maybe we could keep driving like this forever. Watch the
scenery and the world change around us, and we could always stay the same.” She
smiled a smile that betrayed an insecurity, a weakness of façade. She put a hand
on his knee and said, “Tell me again that I’m beautiful.”
“You’re
beautiful.” He mirrored her smile. “Like a movie star trying to disguise herself
as the-girl-next-door.”
“But I am the-girl-next-door.”
“Not
anymore. You’re the girl who ran away.” He said.
A
genuine smile crossed her face this time. “I am, aren’t I?” She suddenly leaned
across the car and kissed Him, a deep kiss that took him so off guard that he
couldn’t stop himself from blushing. She put a hand on his crotch and
commanded, “Pull over.”
“Pull
over? But there’s no-…”
She
broke him off with another kiss. “Pull over.”
“Having
lived through the last month I know I can live through anything.” He said,
seated atop a boulder about a hundred yards from the highway. “I’ll always be
able to call on some kind of strength to get me through any kind of despair.
But if I were ever to commit suicide it would be at this time of day.”
“Why?”
She was sitting in a natural seat that had been worn out of the base of the
rock over unknown millennia. He thought it different and strangely refreshing
that they had just had sex and she was sitting so far apart from him. Two
worlds that had met and then parted again.
“Look
at the sky. It only turns that color when the weather is just right, and when
it does it only lasts for a few minutes. And I’ve only seen that exact shade
here in California.”
She looked to the sky, away from the brittle
blade of desert grass she was twirling in her fingers. A narrow range of
purples blended from horizon to horizon, the bruise left by a blazing sunset
before night falls totally. “That’s a good last color to see.” She blew the
grass from her open palm. “Why, though? Why kill yourself to that color?”
“Hope,
I suppose. Ever since I was a kid that color sky has seemed so beautiful to me
that it fills me with some kind of hope. Like, if something that beautiful can
exist then there must be a god. But it’s a hope and a god so remote that it
makes here and now seem so desolate and lonely.”
“Like
an exile.” She said. “And not matter how close you get to anyone-…”
“You’re
still alone.” He finished her thought. He looked down at Her, but could only
see the back of her head. “And we’re still alone, aren’t we?”
“More
than ever.” She affirmed. A silence came between them and held on for the
eternity of a few seconds. “It’s the rain for me.” She finally said.
“What
about it?”
“I’m
from where there are lots of forests, big pine trees. When it rains in the
forest everything seems to take on extra color against the gray of the clouds.
The pine needles are a deeper green, roads look like mirrors, like they’re made
out of obsidian. Everything seems so alive and connected. Then there’s me.”
“Separated?”
“Yeah.
I mean, it’s a wonderful thing, and it feels so good to let the rain drench you
to the skin, but I don’t feel like I’m a part of the whole.”
Like you’re a piece apart from god, He
thought. She struck him as something forgotten and marooned ages from home and
grace, crushed with a nameless faith, the weight of which was misleading and
empty, and strength was failing.
“But,
it’s not like I’m simply out of place, like I haven’t found a niche or
something. It’s like life is this enormous puzzle with all these intricately
interlocking pieces and I’m a speck of dust on the surface of the puzzle, not
even a piece.”
He
slid down the rock and quietly seated himself cross legged on the desert floor
at her feet. She hugged her knees to her chest, looking with unfocused eyes at
a hairy little spider clambering across the rock near her. “So,” She continued.
“I’m not just out of place, I’m something totally separate. Not only that, but
I’m intruding, I feel guilty because I may be detracting from the beauty of
life and the world by just existing, that, somehow, I make life around me ugly.”
“You’re
beautiful, though. You know that, right?” He asked, trying to reassure her.
“Yes,
like Natalie Wood.” She jokingly flipped her hair and batted eyes that He could
see the beginnings of tears in.
“That’s
not what I meant, toreador, but thanks.” He forced a smile at her Rebel Without
a Cause reference, but she had turned her eyes to the horizon trying to hide
her forming tears.
“What do you mean, then? Tell me.”
For
the first time she looked him dead in the eye and he felt his breath catch ever
so slightly. Her brown eyes were swimming in a veil of tears that had yet to
roll away, rain washed windows to an assaulted soul.
“I
hurt people.” She told him with her eyes locked on his. “I hurt people, I hurt
people, and I keep hurting them.” She pressed her fingers to her eyes, but one
tear escaped and rolled down her face, fell from her chin, and splashed in the
desert dust. Maybe something will grow
there, He thought. A miracle pine
tree that catches rain and never dies.
“I
hurt anyone who loves me, it’s like my love for them runs out and I force them
away. I keep taking and using peoples’ love and break their hearts and the
guilt is crushing me.” Tears were streaming down her face and she was on the
edge of sobbing. He looked up at her, enraptured by the damaged wonder sitting
before him. She was an emerald with a dark history steeped in blood and
betrayal. Those in love with her would murder to have her, but they could never
hold her long.
She
did what she could to wipe the tears from her face. “Your suicide sky is gone.”
She said, pointing to a sky that had gone dark with the onset of night.
“That’s
OK, I wasn’t using it. The stars should be really bright out here tonight, so
it’s worth having not killed myself.” He pointed to the first visible star
which was appearing in the sky next to the silhouette of a lone Joshua Tree. “Venus,”
He said.
“Venus,”
She repeated. “She’s a bitch on wheels. And Cupid’s even worse.”
“They
keep sending people to love you and you hate them?” He laughed, attempting to
cheer her up.
“Exactly,”
was her reply. “They keep sending all these people to love me, but they forget
to send what I need to love them back.”
“It’s
just mythology.” He said. “Just mythology and stars.”
“Things
were so much simpler when stars were just the holes to heaven, toreador.” He
looked up at her with fascination. She was a flawed diamond. Something so pure
she shone, but with the taint of depression and hurt about her.
“Things
are as simple as they’ve ever been. Holes to heaven, constellations of gods and
goddesses, distant suns, it doesn’t matter. Nothing’s changed between people.”
“Something
has to change, eventually. Our bodies will keep on living, but all our souls
will die.”
He
took her hand in his and said, “It’s already happened.”
“This
loneliness is awful, toreador.” She was back on the verge of tears.
“What
can I do to help?” He asked.
“Nothing.
Nothing else, at least, you’ve already done enough.” She squeezed his hand
tightly. “Even considering as close as we’ve come in such a short time, and
that we’ve slept together, never tell me you love me, please.”
He
closed his eyes in the dark of the desert night. “I can’t promise that.”
“Then
there’s trouble on the breeze.” She said.
The
night passed without dreams or speech, just two people together in loneliness
sleeping in the backseat of a car in the desert. He woke in the pale gray of
dawn and slipped out of the car to stretch, doing his best to keep from
disturbing her. All traces of the distant thunderstorms of the day before had
been wiped from the eastern sky and in their place were the soft pinks and
purples that are born just before sunrise. A
weak imitation of the suicide sky, He thought.
He
sat in the front looking back over the seat at her sleeping face. It was
difficult for him to get a grasp on the emotions he’d experienced over the last
day with her, but he knew what was forming. And he knew she wouldn’t like it.
In the quiet of the car, in the calm of the soft desert morning he whispered, “I
love you.” under his breath. She stirred slightly but didn’t wake.
The heat of the day was upon them like a tiger
when he pulled into a gas station. It was an oasis that would have appeared
more appropriate back down the highway in the suburbs that He’d come from.
Farms of some kind were baking in the early sun on both sides of the highway,
brave patches of green clinging to life in the barren hopelessness of the
desert.
He
gently nudged her awake and asked if she needed anything while they were stopped.
“No, I think I’m OK for now.” She said.
He
leaned over and kissed her. “I’ll be right back, then.” Walking across the
parking lot he felt a pure asphalt heat burning over him and he could swear it
was the heat he’d been seeking when he started driving the day before. He stood
still for a moment and closed his eyes, feeling his guilt and hurts begin to
cook away. With the right eyes he could imagine someone being able to see the
vapors of negativity escaping him. He opened his eyes and went into the
mini-mart for drinks and snacks, smiling brightly at the clerk as he left.
Walking
back to the car he noticed a small dust cloud being kicked up a way down the
road. Her green Converse were kicking up the desert dirt as she walked back
down the highway in the direction they had come from. The hot wind tossed her
hair as she shifted her duffle bag from shoulder to shoulder, and she turned
back once to glance behind and their eyes connected briefly. She turned her
gaze back to the horizon of the past and kept walking.
As
he leaned against his car watching her and lighting a cigarette he felt the hot
breeze turn its attention to him. He felt everything he’d been running from
come blowing back in his face. Loss, sin, desolation flowed back to him, air
rushing back into a vacuum that has lost its seal. Starting the car to follow
her He found a note in the passenger seat written on the back of an old
receipt.
I
told you shouldn’t have said you love me, toreador.
Because I love you, too.
The
car idled softly to itself, a musician playing to the emptiness of a sleeping
audience. He lightly rested both hands on the wheel while he stared out at the
strange desert fields in a kind of prayer. He noticed for the first time how
unpleasant cigarette smoke rising into his eyes could be, a sting that reminded
him of the distant memories of tears. He flicked his cigarette out the window
hoping it would land in a thicket of dried grass. Maybe it will start a wild fire, burn this whole desert and allow it to
start over from scratch.
He
crept back on to the highway and let speed gather around him as he watched her
disappear in the rear view mirror and thought, Just keep running, faster and farther. He held the note she had
written to him tightly in his fingers out the window and let the wind whip at
it. He let go and watched it flutter like an origami bird come alive and gone
insane. He ran his fingers through his hair and briefly closed his eyes,
pushing his foot to the floor and driving like a man pursued by something evil
while his most recent shot at salvation walked away into another world.
