“Which horse?” she says. She means to say, which snake? That little leather pouch on the side of the saddle. Billy-O sure knew what he was talking about when he told them to carry a syringe in case of animal bites, particularly the reptilian chordate kind.
Was it the inland taipan? One bite can kill a hundred adult humans. She remembers that from their days of long-gone fascination with the Australian world entire.
Tick, tick, tick. Every panting ticking breath, no sound, except the slow clomping of a confused and riderless horse. Taipan, paralyzing venom. Nerve damage. Muscle damage. Kidney failure. Larissa’s hands are twisted over her open knee. She tries and can’t get up. She can’t move her leg at all. Kidney damage. Maybe this is what happened to her friend Maggie. She was bitten by a taipan and didn’t know it. What did Maggie once tell her?
So long as they believe there is a God, men will go on praying to God long after they’ve ceased to pray for the changing of the wind
. A very smart man had written that. Who was it?
Is it too late for Larissa to pray for the changing of the wind?
Kai’s horse, whose name is Hal, is a scrubland away with the anti-venom. A train station away. A city street. Perhaps as far as the golf course had been from her red front door. Perhaps as far as his Ducati had been from her Escalade that first winter day. Just keep walking Larissa. It’s so cold, and you’ve got a little boy to pick up from school, and a track meet to attend, and a cello recital, and Bo is looking for a
new lover, and Maggie wants to teach you how to paint, and Ezra wants to tell you about Epicurus, and Jared is about to buy you a shiny metal spectacle on wheels that roars down Glenside through the Great Swamp, through the Deserted Village, to Albright Circle and Lillypond where you left your heart. The red horse with the anti-venom is
that
far away.
“I can’t get up,” she says to him, to the skies. “I hurt my leg. I don’t know…something is wrong.”
“Larissa!” Only his bleeding mouth, only his eyes move, dart this way, that. His stiff body is shaking. She sees that his fingers have started to swell, his neck too. His lips protrude; he becomes harder to understand.
But the horse! The horse is already in the past, on the river of memory, inexorably moving toward the sea into which all rivers flow. You can’t touch the same water twice, you had one chance, that was it. The horse had gone.
“O Lord, help me…Get the horse!”
She sees him trying to get up, to sit up. Is this real? She blinks, but no, he is down, not moving, just looking at her. But there he goes again! As clear as love, Larissa sees Kai sitting up, turning around, staring at her with profound, imploring eyes. Is that his soul sitting up? She blinks. He is back down.
Limply she remains on the ground in insurmountable motionless sorrow.
It takes an eternity for him to die.
9
The Seven Ages of Larissa
W
hat do you think of when you’re alone in the desert? Well, it depends. For the first four parcels of time? Or the last two? In the beating downward drive of the sun, or when the blackness around you is so great that you actually begin to pray. Pray! You’re begging God you have never called on for help! Oh, the trench-warfare hypocrisy of it. Dear God, dear God. Remember me. Help me.
Her father, whom she loved more than anyone before he betrayed the family, used to say to her, “Larissa, living a life is not like crossing a field.”
She never knew what that meant, but, boy, did he love to say it.
But now, she almost knows. She wants her horse. Shiloh, Shiloh, Shiloh of Cyrene…so it can help her cross the field.
This is a National Park! Like Yellowstone, like the Grand Canyon, like the Great Swamp in New Jersey near her house…where are other people, one person, one other human being…?
There are fossils of humans here, as old and far back as 40,000 years. Kai calls it time before history. Bushwalk through the sparse and shrubby mallee, through the cypress pines,
hoping for a glimpse of the red kangaroo, of the wedge-tail eagle. That’s what Kai tells her, and perhaps he is right, but all Larissa sees in the gibber, the desert pavement, are rock fragments, pebble size, cobble size. She doesn’t see the goose-foot wildflowers in the scrubland, no colorful leafy chenopods. She doesn’t see Kai moving anymore, sitting up, not even when she blinks. And blinks.
What’s happening? The heroes in their own stories can’t die. She was a theater and an English major. She knows this. You can’t afflict them with death.
Except this isn’t Kai’s story. This is Larissa’s. And she is no hero. Aside from the three children she heroically gave life to—and look where
that
got her. Children, behold your mother.
She turns her body away from his body because seeing him dead while she remains so precariously alive is unbearable.
Precariously alive is a good way to describe everyone. One moment on a horse, the next…If she could walk, she would. But her tendon must have been severed in the fall. She can’t walk
at all
. She cannot in any way stand up, put weight on the leg, move forward. She needs the horse, but the horse is not Riot. It will not come when called. It won’t come even at random, just because. Just saunter over to find some dry scrub near her. No.
Did the horses run away from her desperate cries, or did they gallop away from the snake? And does it matter?
Larissa sits on the ground, and when she can’t sit any longer, she lowers herself into the sand and drags her body sideways, away from Kai’s, drags it slowly like a foot soldier, until she is fifty feet away, a hundred. Until he is a speck, an illusion in sunlight. A mirage.
She has to get herself to the horse. Then…she will mount it, she doesn’t have to walk to do it, she just has to pull herself up to do it.
The severed tendon is like paralysis of the limb. The leg
that once was is now no more. Did she sever her patellar tendon? And is this something that needs to be repaired surgically? To even think of those two words, repair and surgical, in the context that Larissa today finds herself in, is comical. On a flat unpaved terrain, as far as the eye can see dirt, bush, scraggly eucalypts. Nothing else. No phone. No hospital. No other people. Snakes, though. Heat. It isn’t that the horses had gone. It’s that there is no way to get to the horse. Damn animal!
After college, Jared was playing weekend league football and tore his Achilles tendon. It was awful for him. He had to have surgery and couldn’t move for weeks. Larissa was on the field when he injured himself, and as she ran up, she could see he was in terrible distress. Can you stand, the trainer had asked him. He tried. His leg hung under him as two grown men lifted him by his underarms, put him on a stretcher finally.
Could someone lift her, put her on a stretcher?
Come here, Shiloh, come here, Hal! The water flask is strapped to the Waler’s side. Near the anti-venom syringe. Larissa cringes. Leaving herself in just a bra, she takes off her blouse, tears it into strips, and ties the knee up as best she can. It has swollen under her hands and has become so painful to touch that she has to bite her lip, let out curdles of screams before she can tie the shirt around the knee. She had thought the bandage might make it easier for the leg to function, but that’s just a maladaptive thought disorder on her part, a delusion. Bandage or no, the leg is useless. A severed tendon is worse than a broken bone. You can still sort of stand on a broken bone right after the injury. Having broken her ankle in the unfortunate hairdresser incident, Larissa was still able to get up off the dirty rug in the hallway outside the salon, to gimp to the car, even to drive. It wasn’t until four hours later that Jared took her to the emergency room.
Here, she had a non-working limb even before the shock
of the gaping wound wore off. To be replaced with other shocks: the wandering horses, the pervasive fear of snakes, the anguish of the calamity of broken love, the broken man she hitched her wagon to, and then, the blaze of the sun and his foaming paralysis, both falling in slow motion, from excessive force, from irrational violence. Under her hands she still feels his chest and shoulder, his unshaven surprised face, both fists shoving him, her throat emitting that agonizing groan, him trying to grab on to her, failing, falling. The horses startling and pitching forward, causing the loss of balance in the riders. Yes, but what about the loss of his life? Did they cause that, too?
What hubris it was to think it would last! That it would last because of the magnitude of her sacrifice, the exorbitant price she had to pay to be with him. Or that when the flame went out, something deeper would be left, like Love, like with Jared. But here, after the curettage, nothing was left in the scraped-out, abandoned cavity of the suffering mutually theirs.
The horse, his? Hers? It might as well be three miles away. She can’t get to it. She tries. She crawls.
How long has she been crawling? Is it almost evening? Can’t be, the sun is still so high. She can’t tell by the color of her skin, but she thinks she might be burned pretty bad. Some of the skin on top of her wrists has begun to bubble up. The Akubra Stylemaster is loose on her head, but the body can’t be covered with its wide brim. The knee throbs every time her heart takes a beat. She counts. Sixty, fifty, forty stabs a minute of severed wickedness.
Out here in the open, truth and consequences plays in her heart when there’s nowhere to hide from them, when there’s nothing else to think about, and the pain is so great every time she breathes, every time her heart beats.
It becomes hard to believe she is not being flayed for her sins.
She has to get to the horse before the sun goes down. That is a must, there is no choice. She cannot, will not, spend darkness in the desert.
Jared, I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, children, your mother is sorry. But even as she said it, she felt worm-like in her eleventh-hour contrition. When she ran from them, she didn’t allow herself to think of them. She rode on the back of his bike with the wind in her hair, she gulped mountain air, she was hot and thirsty, she was salty, she was Love, she was alive! She convinced herself readily that her family would be fine. But were they fine? It was hard to tell from her vantage point of being in pre historic Australia, in a nest of human-eating taipans, indifferent Walers, treacherous men. How do you replace love with know ledge? How do you repeal your self-obsessed agenda? How do you change what can’t be changed?
If only she could get to that horse. Is she moving closer to it, crawling on the ground, or is it just a mirage? Is it moving closer to her perhaps? Larissa blinks. Shiloh momentarily vanishes and is replaced by a sepulcher of tall branchy trees, and a gate, with a man slowly riding a horse through the sloping golf course. The Short Hills Country Club would do that in the wintertime, arrange for a rider on a white horse to celebrate the winter solstice. Larissa tried never to miss it. Except for the last two years when she didn’t even know it was happening.
How do other people summon horses? What would Billy-O do?
Here, horsie, she calls out, thinks she calls out.
Here, here, horsie.
Is she calling a horse or a cat? Neither would come. Riot would come. She was a good dog. She would come. But she
can’t ride Riot out of the apocalypse, can she? She can’t mount her Labrador retriever.
What did Billy-O tell her? She can’t remember. He told her…he told her…don’t tell the horse to “whoa” unless you want her to stop. If you want her to slow down, say, “slow.” Don’t say “whoa.”
Larissa calls out. She summons her powers, her lungs, takes a deep breath and yells, “Whoa!” She yells it again and again. Trouble is, she can’t tell if the horse is moving, stalling, slowing, stopping. Is the horse still? The sun makes everything shiver, like the air is trembling, and the horse, too. Larissa crawls on the dusty ground, dragging her leg. Her elbows are hurting, are scraped raw, her forearm is bleeding, for some reason, bleeding right into the dust. “Whoa, Shiloh. Whoa.”
She is a field away from the horse. Living a life is not like crossing a field.
What if the horse isn’t even there? What if it is also a mirage?
All of it a mirage. Even her. To be this hot, this arid, to hurt so much, to have so much pain, inside and out.
Una palabra
. What is the
one word
I’m looking for that I can’t find, one word that will bring me comfort, or stop my horse, or save me? Why don’t I know that
una palabra
?
Where had the time gone?
Fickle friends. Now she knew why Bart was so apathetic to her. They knew. They all knew he loved someone else, that he was done with her. And they were lying for him. The only one who didn’t know was her.
O God! Why are you forsaking me now? Help me…I just want to go to Manila and see my friend. That’s all I want. I want to see Father Emilio and say to his kind face, you were right, and I was so stupid. To see Nalini.
Larissa cries into the dirt, and breathes in too much of it, chokes, spits it out, sputtering, hacking, panting. She is so thirsty.
She thinks she might feel better if only she weren’t so thirsty. The sun torments her from the sky. She needs water. Feebly she cries out. Help, help. Yihah…yihah…
All stories end with death.
Yes, just not mine.
His.
Not mine. Eve’s. Simi’s. Kai’s. Not mine. I’m the narrator in my own story. I have to get myself back on the horse, and then I’ll be all right. I’ll find my way. I’ll go see Nalini. Together she and I will figure out what to do. I can still do stuff. I’ll drive a bus. I’ll fish. I’ll sell Father Emilio’s fruits.
There must be other things I can do after I get to the horse. I’m so close. It’s not too far, it’s right within reach. Whoa, she keeps whispering. Whoa.
She hears the Dylanesque sound of his harmonica, blowing plaintive notes of a barely familiar tune…He plays, and then he stops and sings. They’re in her car, and it’s lunchtime. It’s before much, but after much also. There’s nothing yet to return from, and because of that it seems so simple, so happy, and it hurts the heart. He blows, and then he sings
.