Authors: Claire Vaye Watkins
Family:
Asparagaceae
.
Luz carried this bestiary everywhere she went, showing no one but Ig. It felt secret, sacred, and she needed to be close to it. Ig was mad for the book, asked for
more
and
more
and
more
—drawn to and focused on Levi’s drawings as Luz had never seen her. Together they read and reread the primer in different places—alone in the Blue Bird, in Levi’s geodesic dome, in the Holiday Rambler while the girls were working, in secret at bonfire. Luz needed to meet the beasts in different lights, and with different people swirling about, to be sure that they were real.
Though she’d been warned by pretty much everyone against straying from the colony alone, she left Ig with Dallas and walked as far into the Amargosa as she ever had, clutching the primer to her. She walked until all she could see of the colony was the red bustier flapping from the antenna of the Holiday Rambler and then she stood, listening. On the wind she heard the dune she’d once thought barren
flourish and thrive and teem, heard creatures great and small blazing new paths to abundance. The primer turned a world once shriveled into a locus of succor. One day, as she was leaving the colony, Luz watched a crackled blue tarp escape on a gust and soar off into the Amargosa. She watched idly until it disappeared, annoying Camille and Dot, the sisters whose shade was wriggling out of sight. By then the dune sea was inarguably alive. The tarp could be going anywhere. It could settle upon a tomb dug by a devious ant. It could be a queer surface rolled over by a forever snake. It could shade a parliament of miniature owls. The world was that expansive. Now there were tortoises out of Dalí and Technicolor lizards and wandering trees for Ig. Suddenly this was a land of
could
. Flamboyant, vibrant, polychrome and iridescent, there was turquoise, pink, olive, yellow and red. Glossy red-black with a white bow tie. The taste of blood and vinegar. Acid pools and poison webbery, egg-suckers and salt munchers, mucus slurpers and vampires, so many inspired ways to eat and be eaten. And what was vibrancy but being very, very alive? She and Ig were an example in her mind. It was soon very obvious that the world was made of unseen wonders, which we might call miracles.
—
And if she did not yet believe in miracles, one morning Levi returned from dowsing early and sent Nico to bed. Instead of going to bed himself he took Luz and Ig out for an expedition. As Luz climbed atop the buzzing solar dune buggy, Levi paused to wrap Ig’s bare head with the cloth from his.
Do not wear a man’s hat unless you intend to keep him,
Luz recalled.
They did not ascend into the dune but rode away from it, through the land of
could
to a patch of sky pasted on a sandblasted billboard. As
they neared, the billboard went from sky to water, water with a wiggly veinery of white light.
Here, they turned onto a gravel road. Eventually a bubble rose from the earth, clay gray, snub-ended. Ig said, “What is?”
It took Luz a moment to find the word. “A . . . building.”
Its doors were waffled fiberglass, green, chained closed but curled up from the bottom by some vandal’s effort—Levi’s, Luz soon realized. He crawled through this space, then reached for Ig. She clung to Luz at first, but went with some urging. Luz crawled in after.
Inside, she had some trouble breathing. The air was viscous, resistant to inhale. Gas, was her morbid thought, an oven. She looked for Ig. But the cement beneath her was relatively cool. Moisture, she remembered. Humidity.
“What do you think?”
The ceiling glowed yellow, and there was movement on it. She looked for its source and saw a shimmering square of jade: fluid, liquid light ribboning. So much color it stung, soft turquoise streaked with evergreen algae and, above, gold. Grassy water plants grew at the cracks of the pool, and a pump burbled somewhere. Impossible.
“Solar,” said Levi, pointing to coils of black tubing. A towel hung petrified on the back of a plastic chair. Mounted opposite them was a long rod with a hook at the end. A sign beside a Styrofoam life preserver said,
NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY
. A municipal oasis, mineral water once drawn from a spring and now just circulating, was Levi’s theory. Indeed, a rime of salt had dried on the tiles ringing the edge: 3', 5', 9', 12',
NO DIVING
. A ring of buoys strung across the pool’s midpoint, the rope rotted black. Luz could not adjust to the languid green of it all. The parts of her eyes for processing green had perhaps atrophied. Another fragment from Ray’s notebook, something about chintzy rods & cones.
Luz closed her eyes. Being in the bubble was like being in an angel’s inner ear, echoes of their voices and also its own hum. A seashell sound.
“How did you find this?” she asked eventually.
“Something like this is an earbug for me.”
“Like a song?”
“A song the way the deaf hear it. Like music you feel.”
“How does it work? Your . . . dowsing.”
He laughed. “Have you ever felt the tension between a couple arguing in front of you? Or walked into a building and gotten a bad feeling? Met someone and known, instantly, that they could not be trusted?”
“Of course.”
“Voices are loudest when they’re negative, but there are others too. Think about the feeling of someone watching you. A lover admiring you from across a party. Or thinking of someone and at that moment they call. Or déjà vu. These energies are all around us, all the time. I happen to have an ear for the organic. But anyone can do it.”
“Jimmer says it’s a kind of listening.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’ve never been a very good listener.”
Levi shook his head. “That sounds like someone else’s idea of you.”
Ig squirmed and whinnied. “She loves the water,” Luz said.
“I know she does.” Levi pulled his shroud over his head, folded it once and laid it on a chair. “Let’s take her in.”
He waded in, naked, his trunk refracted at the water line. “So nice,” he said, then went under. Ig squealed. “It’s okay,” Luz said. “He’s swimming. You want to try?” She undressed Ig and passed her to Levi. At first she was still, then she began to cry, her face going red and warped. She grasped Levi savagely, her feet wanting bottom. She shrieked for Luz—
Mama!
she was all but saying. So Luz immediately
pulled her own shroud off and slid in. The gentle mineral water held her—what it must have been like in the womb. Luz wondered, involuntarily, whether the same thought had occurred to her mother as she allowed herself pulled under. Death by drowning was warm, supposedly, but the Pacific had been cold every time Luz plunged in, cold and rough and loud. Luz took Ig from Levi and soothed her. Filth washed from them and floated away in shimmering floes. Ig settled and loosened her grip on Luz’s hair, which was disintegrating from clumps to strands again. In the water, they weighed less. Luz was not at all afraid, though she had always feared water.
“Come on,” said Levi, treading toward the rope.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t swim.”
He pulled her deeper.
“Don’t,” she laughed.
Ig let Luz lay her prone, but ignored her and Levi when they said together, “Kick, kick, kick!” Her pale rump bobbed placid above the surface. The bottom of the pool was slime-slick, and when Luz tripped she took Ig under too. Luz came up with Levi’s arms around her waist, with Ig in her arms, laughing. Luz was startled for a moment but laughed too, at Ig’s clucking.
When Ig wore herself out laughing, Luz wrapped her in Levi’s robe and laid her on one of the plastic loungers with the fossilized straps. Luz retrieved Ig’s nini and Levi materialized a thin pad of brute root—“For you,” he clarified when she looked confused. Luz took the root and Ig took the nini and soon the child lay content and drowsy, the grown-ups moving soundlessly around the shallow end.
Levi’s erection was frank and elegant. With the child subtracted from the threesome Luz watched him unabashedly, and he her. “Is she asleep?” he whispered after some time.
She was, and as answer Luz backed onto the pool steps, reclined against them and opened her legs, slightly, the water like cool cotton
against her. Levi approached, unhurried, and when he finally reached her he hooked one thick arm around her waist and lifted her from the water.
She liked the compression of his weight above her and the cool, ungiving concrete deck below. They moved together in silence, eyes closed, feeling everything. Across the bubble, Ig slept.
After, they washed each other. She felt all the parts of his body she’d been curious about: his broad and hairy shoulders, his plump butt and the scoop of sacrum above it. They clung together, weightless, and whispered to each other.
“I can’t stop reading the primer,” Luz said. “It’s . . . magic.”
“It’s science.”
“I can’t believe they’ve ignored all this.”
“Believe it.”
“Are they just incompetent?”
“I wish they were.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re told this is a wasteland because they need it to be a wasteland.”
“I don’t understand.”
On the lounger, Ig sighed, then settled.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” said Levi. “I feel I can and should be. Are you prepared for that?”
She was.
“What I’m about to tell you is big. Not the kind of thing you can unknow. I want you to be aware of that before you decide. I don’t want to force you into anything.”
“You’re not.”
He nodded. “We’re told we don’t exist because they need us not to exist. They need to take control of the Amargosa. ‘Stop it,’ everyone
says. ‘The unrelenting march.’ That slogan. Of course, this is a natural process we’re talking about. This is the inevitable result of our own savagery. And we want to stop it because it reminds us of our tremendous neglect and of the violence we’ve done to this place. Your friend Powell knew that. The Amargosa reaches outward on all sides, toward Phoenix and Vegas, San Diego and Sacramento. To Mexico and Canada and New York and Washington, DC. Not good for national morale. Hard to sleep in the green East with a mountain of sand bearing down on you. Step one: establish that it’s barren. Step two: destroy it.”
“But they’ve tried that. They’ve tried everything.”
“Not everything.”
He took her back to Albuquerque, where he had taken to sleeping in the lab to avoid the woman whose spurning had slashed the thin membrane restraining her outright hatred of him. There, one night, he heard a new call, behind the voices from the sample cabinet, which were always gossiping, behind the murmurs of the biomass slivers pressed between slides. There was something urgent in the call, something that pulled him deep down into the subterranean bowels of the National Labs, swiping his Zed clearance badge along the way. Something was trapped in that bunker, he knew, something freest of free now caged in a coffin, a tomb, he could feel the confines against him even as he slid silently down the concrete stairs. The call engorged as he approached the bottommost level. The corridor was dark but the call urged him onward. Two MPs sat on stools. One nodded at his badge, the other leaned away from him, unnerved by the wildness in his eyes. The voice, Levi realized, was a Utah voice, a call from home, and he had not heard such a thing since he left. Things were aligning inside him, and yet there was chaos in him too. He had to act. He swiped again, pressed his thumb to an electronic pad for another guard without even realizing it.
In a room lit yellow the call became a chorus, a tabernacle choir stretching out a mournful note. A dozen warheads nested in pens, like livestock. From within the physics packages his ex-lover had designed came that Utah calling, his mineral brothers, his isotopic kinfolk, twenty-eight thousand pounds of Moab uranium-235 teetering on the cusp of fission, descendants of Trinity, Operation Crossroads, Operation Greenhouse, Ivy Mike, Castle Bravo, Operation Argus, Operation Dominic, Operation Storax, Operation Plowshare, all humming to be free.
“A nuclear bomb?” Luz asked.
“Bomb
s
,” he said. “And not just any. What they call nonconforming design. I’d seen the plans. I’d listened. That woman, the one I was with, she thought I didn’t understand her work. She would leave schematics out to belittle me. ‘Careful,’ she’d say. ‘You’ll go cross-eyed.’ I let her think she was teaching me something; I asked her stupider and stupider questions until she couldn’t help but correct me. That package wasn’t designed to detonate underground. Not a burrower, like they said. The design was retro, clunky, humongous. Nothing that would fit in a suitcase. The kind they drop from the sky. The OGs: Fat Man, Little Boy. Operation Glassjaw, they call it.”
Strands of rot swayed from the black rope, the serene water suddenly choking with them, but Luz blinked these away. “I don’t . . .”
“I didn’t believe it either. Despite everything I’d seen. And then they sent me here, to survey. That’s what they said. An exhaustive survey to address lingering concerns from local environmental interests. But I knew what they meant: find nothing. They need this to be a dead place so they can kill it.”
“But why? Just to make people back East feel better? It doesn’t make sense.”
He tucked a wet strand of hair behind her ear. “What do you know about nuclear waste?”
“It’s poisonous. Lasts forever.”
“Pretty much. Unequivocally lethal for longer than we’ve been upright. Two hundred fifty thousand years, then tapering. To compare, the pyramids aren’t even five thousand years old.”
“And there’s a lot of it.”
“Making more every day with the last of our water.”
“And they have nowhere to put it,” she said.
“Barnwell, Clive, Deaf Smith. All failed.” He nodded. “Even Yucca Mountain. About a hundred miles from here. Have you ever been? It’s finished now—the tunnels, trains, even the warning monument. Landscape of Thorns, they call it. All on hiatus until the timing’s right.”
“‘Not in my backyard,’” said Luz.
“Exactly.”
“But it has to go somewhere.”
Levi nodded again, perhaps a little disappointed. “Industry would be delighted to hear you say that. ‘It has to go somewhere’ is one of the most expensive, most effective covert jingles of our time. See, it only ‘has to go somewhere’ if it remains as deadly as it is. To establish a national repository is to promise we will use nuclear power forever and never hold the industry responsible for making its waste safe. It becomes the state’s problem. They make a product that is poisonous and they’ve managed to change the conversation so that we accept that as a given: it will always be poisonous, so ‘it has to go somewhere.’ The question is where? That’s
not
the question—it shouldn’t be. It’s a motherfucking shell game.”