Authors: Claire Vaye Watkins
Her impulse to join Levi was tempered not only by Ig on her hip, cranky from her truncated nap, but by the pair she’d passed as she’d entered the dome, a girl called Rachel, sex-flushed, and Cody, who failed to meet Luz’s gaze, squeezing Ig’s bare foot instead. Though Luz knew she had no right to be hurt, she was.
Levi tipped water over the rocks, and they watched it hiss instantly to steam. “You’ll want to sit,” he said. “Heat rises.”
She sat across from him and tried to coax Ig into her lap, but the girl was interested only in climbing on and off Levi’s cot. “Let her,” Levi said.
Luz began. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by. Since . . . Ray . . .”
“We don’t own each other, Luz.”
“I know. It’s just . . . complicated.”
“Complications are human inventions.”
“I know,” she said, “but I’m feeling—”
“Come over here.”
“I just wanted to tell you—”
“I can’t talk to you when you’re way over there.”
Luz moved close enough to feel a swell of heat coming off him. “You’re burning up,” she said.
“That’s the idea,” he said. “Important decisions to be made. I’m going deep within for answers.” He meant the wall of rock coming at them, she knew, and other decisions too.
Luz said, “He’s Ig’s father.”
Levi put his hand on the back of her neck and shook his head. “So you’re lying to me? Closing off again?”
“No, I—”
“That’s not you talking—it’s him. He’s toxic. I’ve seen the two of you together. He’s poisoning you.”
“He’s not,” said Luz.
“Listen to yourself. Look at you.” He pointed to her crossed arms and her folded legs, her yielding shoulders and drooping head. “You’re all walls, all barricades. Your body’s a prison.”
She uncrossed her arms but had nowhere to put them. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.” He retrieved a pouch drooping with dried, dark roots. “Here.” She added a nub to the one gone pulpy in her mouth.
“I’ve never been with you,” she said, “on a dowsing. I’d like to see that.”
“I’m going to touch you,” he said.
“Wait, Levi. Please. Will you take me with you one day?”
He kept touching her. “Don’t you want to get back to where we were?”
Luz wanted to get back there, she did, even if she didn’t know where it was. But wherever it was, Ray would not be there. She looked to Ig.
“Let her be,” said Levi.
As if to counter, Ig yanked Levi’s blanket from his roll and nearly toppled the cot. “No, Ig,” said Luz. “Stop.”
Ig began to cry.
“She’s too hot in here,” said Luz, pushing Levi’s hands away. “She didn’t get a nap.”
Luz tried to comfort Ig. The child’s face was flame-red and slick as the flesh of some lost fruit. The tantrum continued, frenzy and agitation rippling like waves through the baby’s whole body. She flailed, would have flung herself atop the scorched stones had Luz not restrained her. “Shhh,” Luz tried. She didn’t know what the fuck she was doing and never had.
Levi peeled a tendril of root from the pouch. “Give her this.”
Ig screamed on. Luz hesitated to take Levi’s offering and hated that she did. She could not seem to escape herself—Ray’s return was proof of that.
She took the root and presented it to Ig. Miraculously, Ig paused in her rage, accepted the root and, as with everything, inserted it into her mouth. “Good girl,” said Levi, his hands on Luz again, making promises.
Soon Ig was suckling quiet and wide-eyed on the cot—“That’s her mind’s knot untying,” Levi said. “Perfectly natural.”
Luz let Levi undress her, then slid atop him.
After, heat-sick and dizzy, she said, “You’ll take me with you? I want to see you work.”
Levi sighed. “Not now, Luz.”
“Please,” she said. “I need to see for myself.”
Levi handed her the pouch of root. “Do you hear yourself?” he said. “You have doubt pouring off you. I can’t bring you. I can’t have you contaminating the process.”
Luz lifted Ig, spaced-out and silent, from the cot.
“I need peace now,” Levi said, and Luz showed herself out.
—
Jimmer rebuilt his cathedral canyon for Ray, there on the high white slopes of the dune sea, recasting each statue and sculpture, repainting each mural, rearranging each altar, reigniting each candle. Ray listened and watched the luminous dome below. Shapes moved inside, inky against the light. Ray did not allow himself to speculate on who the shapes might be. But then Luz emerged from the dome, Ig limp on her hip.
Jimmer stopped talking. He’d seen Luz too and with his silence sanctified Ray’s dejection. Jimmer did not need to say what he said next. It was a fact both men knew and both would have preferred not to have aloud and airborne between them, for they also knew that for all the glee and speed and colossal fun of the day, this would be what they remembered, what it all led to, the utterance undoing all else, the tug of the first thread. The knowledge would make Ray lie when Jimmer descended back down to the colony, make him say he only wanted to enjoy the quiet a little longer. It would keep Ray up in the dune that night. But like Ray, Jimmer had his little one on his mind, his cathedral and his son. He was brimming with everything still unsaid, of and to the child who was no longer. He wanted to say his name, which was the name of the grandfather who’d taken no interest in the boy. Jimmer felt the boy’s arm too yielding where Jimmer yanked it, his freckled shoulder abandoning its socket. Jimmer touched his own tongue to the boy’s gummy red pit, a tooth yanked free too soon. He felt all things going, and though it was obvious and unnecessary and too late, he told Ray, “Son, you’re not safe here.”
Luz had chewed the whole sack of brute root and the flames were diamonds and triangles, arrows of light with pretty blue lozenges inside them. People spoke to her and she watched their faces go cubist, the features tectonic and akimbo. She walked. Bikes were sculpture in the new high country, thanks to impeding boulders and sandy sagebrush haystacks, and for a long time she stared at a pile of them, dancing. Jimmer’s teepee sprouted skyward like a beanstalk, and had she a little more energy she would have climbed it to heaven. She made a note to do that, if need be. Cody’s vans had little constellations of condensation in the corners of their windows, which were eyes wide open to all the alchemy in the world, which even Ray could not smash. She believed in something, would leap over the maybe-Sierras, smiling up at and down on her with their jack-o’-lantern teeth. She could feel ideas as they were conceived in her mind, shooting-star neuron kites with strings grazing her gray matter—a tingle breezing from one
side of her skull to the other. She felt this epiphany—that ideas were physical and an attuned person could feel them—the way others felt a sneeze coming on. Which was to say there were all different ways of listening. She heard her brain whispering to her eyes, convincing them anew of such concepts as color and light. She was very still for a very long time. She was inside her own heart, kneeling in a soupy chamber, going at the wall with a ball-peen hammer. She’d cracked a hole there, in the wall between the intellectual and the sensual, and so her thoughts were sensations. She tracked a tremor of relief as it surfed a deep layer of her dermis. She could hear different parts of her going through their involuntary, invisible procedures. They were worker bees or drones, and baked, she remembered, like Dallas had said, the inside of you is baked. Her organs had been tanning, they were leathery or peeling or charred and miserly, and still valves were opening and closing, rings of muscles cinched and uncinched, flaps of skin fluttered to a silent close, and an impossible number of little fingers were waving in some acid bath, saying,
Onward! Onward! Onward! Go! Go! Go!
She said,
Ig, Ig, Ig,
but no one answered. Somewhere someone laughed and the laughter turned to smoke, which lifted skyward and made a message there, an unreadable message whose gist she was almost able to grasp. The very dust on her skin was alive, its mites crawling all over her, and if she could only be still enough she herself would be the ecosystem. It might have been one night, or three. Someone brought her a red ovary to eat and she held it in her two hands until she forgot about it but then it hatched and birthed warm liquid and in it swam smiling larvae and these belonged on her in the ecosystem of her body and so she smeared them upon herself and walked into the dune and dug a burrow where she would wait and see all those wondrous creatures for herself, see them hatch across her.
This is where they found her. This is where they said her name.
But their words were not words until the words were, “Ig is hurt.”
“What?”
“They think she was bitten by something.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“She’s with Jimmer.”
—
Ig’s body told the story: one whole side of her swollen to bursting and black, her left arm bloated and prosthetic-looking, unable to bend, her neck swallowed, her eye sockets screaming red seams between two bulbs of waxy flesh. Ray was with her, and Jimmer too. Ray held a peeled stick in her mouth. “It holds her tongue down.” He showed Luz where it was worst: the red-ringed punctures in the baby’s blood-glutted head and in both hands, yeasty like over-risen dough, the digits all but indistinguishable.
“Jimmer says tarantula wasps. Or vinegaroons. She can’t eat yet, so we can’t tell whether it’s affected her sense of taste. She probably walked into a nest. You can see that some got caught in her hair. They would sting her head and she’d reach up to stop them and then they’d sting the tips of her fingers. She couldn’t understand what it was and no one was there. They would sting her and she’d reach up again. This happened over and over until she passed out. One of the girls found her this morning. Took us two hours just to get the stingers out. No one could find you.”
“Keep pressing,” Jimmer told Ray. “Her tongue’s as big as a fist.” The baby’s throttled breathing was unbearable, only worse those moments it stopped.
“Keep her awake,” Jimmer told Ray.
Luz said, “What can I do? Tell me what to do.”
No one answered. Ray began to cry, quietly, the only other sound
Jimmer grinding a stone between two others until it was green dust. This he mixed with water in a gourd to make a mud. He began coating Ig’s distended body in this. “Bentonite clay,” he told Ray. “Draws the poison out. Wish I had aloe but this will have to do.”
“Thank you,” Luz said. “I don’t deserve your help.”
“I am not helping you,” Jimmer said. He handed the gourd to Ray and instructed him to continue smearing Ig. To Luz he said, “Come with me.”
Outside, clouds were snagged on the teeth of the maybe-Sierras, dropping rain that evaporated before it hit the ground. Jimmer said, “Luz, we all have an obligation to the people who love us. They’ve given us this gift whether we want it or not and it is our duty to stand up and be worthy. We are not loved in proportion to our deserving, and thank God for that, for unworthies like you and me would find that life a bitch. We’re loved to the level we ought to rise, and even in returning it we are obligated to be gentle. Do you understand me? You chose her; she didn’t choose you. She came into this world unawares and not knowing better than to love full-blast. You seem to be doing your best to teach her what a mistake that is. Is that what you’re after? To make sure this little one knows what a dreadful business love can be? You’re learning that yourself, and so you think you might give her lessons while you’re at it, is that right?”
“No.”
“No. Because you aren’t even thinking about her. That would involve too much foresight and consideration on your part. That would imply a plan and some sitting and thinking about what would be best for someone other than Luz, and you haven’t ever done that, have you? Now, I’ve made mistakes. I’ve lost people. But you’ve thrown them away. There is an important difference. You’re waiting for someone to come scoop you up. Well, you want to know who comes along and does the scooping? Scavengers. You’re busted up, anyone can see that.
But tell me why you’ve got to bust up this little one, too. Are you lonely? You want a companion down there, in the sinkhole you’ve become? Shame on you.”
Luz touched her pocket absently.
Jimmer ripped her hand away. “You want more? Go get more—chew yourself into oblivion!”
“No—”
“Go on—I mean it! Bon voyage!”
“I don’t want it.”
“And when you go, don’t come back. Not for Ig and not for anyone. Kill yourself quick instead of slow, and save us all the hurt.”
“I don’t want it,” Luz told him and told herself.
But she did want it, wanted it badly, wanted it even more in the following days, when she was not to go back to Ig. She was not helpful, according to Jimmer, or rather she would be tremendously helpful if she would just stay the fuck away. Her waking hours yawned before her without Ig to suck them up, and without the root, each day was a greenhouse for worry. But she did not seek out more. She read Sacajawea’s birth of Little Pomp and John Muir’s campaign for Yosemite until her eyes gave in to headache, until tremors began in her bowels and shuddered outward from there. Soon, her only project was making it outside to evacuate in a timely manner and back in again. Each of the four stairs rising into the Blue Bird took on its own personality, presented its unique challenges—the staggering height of the first, the tricky wedge of the third. She vomited everything she had in her and otherwise emptied herself, first in privacy and then, when she could not make it to privacy, out in the open. People gawked, but Luz
did not notice them. In this way word spread that Luz was sick. One day Dallas came, and another Ray, each bringing water and news of Ig’s progress. The second time Ray came he stayed, insisting on placing a bucket beside Luz and tending to her.
Cramps turned her inside out and, forgetting, she asked where all the pain was coming from. “You’ve been chewing a tranquilizer,” Ray said. “You’re going through withdrawal.”
Eventually, Luz spoke only to moan apologies. “I was supposed to be better than her people, but I’m not,” she said. “Not . . . not . . . not.” Her wet head in Ray’s lap was his forgiveness.