After the Sun

by Jonas Eika

  Antonio awoke almost choking on his own breathing. The pain burned sour in his throat. Coughing made the plastic tube writhe in the wound. He took it out of his mouth, leaned his head back and opened the passageway. Then he got back up on his legs and shook the images out of his head, images of jackrabbits with long, erect ears and black-spotted coats. Hundreds of jackrabbits hopping across the steppes, dry lakes and mountainsides, the jackrabbit being a kind of totem animal in Karen Ruthio’s universe—the images were being sent to him from Las Vegas! He had read about her concerts, that she sometimes, toward the end of the show, would ask the audience who they were missing, who was alone somewhere and needed a greeting. She would choose one person from the many who had their hands in the air, because we’ll need all of our psychic energy, as she had said in the article. Antonio Simmons is in Rachel, Nevada, she was saying now, while the band played the first few bars of “Strong Legs, Attentive Ears.” In a moment you’ll see an image on the screen. I am going to sing about this image. And you are going to send it to Antonio Simmons. He is lying asleep in Rachel, Nevada. He will dream about this image. Try to send it to him. And on the screen a black-tailed jackrabbit appeared, and Karen Ruthio sang, Jackrabbit, jackrabbit—always on the run / I see you running parallel to my prayers / across the steppe . . . Antonio exhaled and felt the metal begin to oscillate; it was still warm. The scream emerged in his throat and harmonized with the Sender’s scream above the lake. It was inside him now, a distant, matte-red desert full of terrestrial organisms, but still empty and differently vast from this desert, or at least the images the scream evoked inside him were. Maybe they were of the desert as it would look without him there. And then his breathing got in the way and blew it to pieces, and he wanted to choke his breathing. Even in the most deserted places, he heard the sound of his own heart and his lungs, those stubborn factories. Their incessant activity was like a promise of a way out or a purpose he had to let go of. It was a slow and painful realization. That he needed to let go of the thought of sharing his coming union with the Sender and the plants and the animals with Fay. But it meant everything to him now, the possibility that she would find his note in the mail slot, rush out here and find him screaming with the animals nuzzling around him. And she would take his hand and become part of the ritual.

  But to leave his breathing behind and enter the now was to eliminate the distance between himself and the next moment, and thereby to lose the future. And all of his conceptions, all his hope and fear and courage, came from the future.

  He had to lose that which only in the moment of loss would stop meaning everything.

  He didn’t understand. And then he did it.

  He made the mouthpiece vibrate, and as the air seeped out of his lungs he listened to the monotone dissonance of the scream, received what it promised, felt it spread through his breast and make his organs oscillate so that a formless life gushed forth—and after a moment’s silence at the end of his exhale, the scream turned him into pure vibration. Air streamed through the respiratory band, from his mouth and back into the tube beneath his larynx, a perfect, circular continuity whose sound was the scream. Around the Sender, the animals stiffened as if they were receiving two conflicting commands. The snipes flapped, bewildered, and the plants trembled on the lake bed. Some of the mammals withdrew from the mass of fur and made their way as if in a trance to Antonio, and pressed against him. Two pronghorns, a lynx, a number of jackrabbits and wild rabbits; they found their places among each other and started to nuzzle his legs and groin. The birds landed on his shoulders, lizards leaped from the antelopes to his chest and pressed their bellies against him. But he was full to the skin with the vibration of the scream and couldn’t feel them. It made his contours flicker in the crystal-green light that was itself the encounter between his body and the animals’. There was only their union, and not his feeling of joy that it was finally happening. There was only joy. Diagonally across, the Sender quivered in perfect symmetry with him. The light that streamed from them collided in a wall of green spirals.

  A vehicle wheezed somewhere in the desert, quickly approaching. As two white beams of light fell over the lake, the sound of the motor forced its way through the vibration and into Antonio. With a long gasp he inhaled, breaking the respiratory band, and the scream faded in his throat. Warmth returned to his body, blood rushed into his face and hands. He felt the animals leave him and blinked. The vehicle came to a stop at the edge of the lake, doors opened, hurried steps approached from the left on the crunchy ground. Twenty yards away, they came into view, backlit by the vehicle: twelve uniformed men with their rifles aimed at him. Don’t shoot, cried Antonio, but only a dry whistle came out. All his strength had left him. His bones rattled and pulled him toward the lake bed. He wanted to tell them that the Sender was theirs, that he wouldn’t say anything to anyone if they just let him go. He was only thinking of Fay now, and almost falling apart at the thought of not seeing her again. He’s ancient, hissed one of the soldiers. Antonio looked at him pleadingly and sat down next to the suitcase. Somewhere above their heads, something was moving in the air, but its buzzing was different from the fighter jets and commercial planes, not as piercing. A small, pitch-black circle appeared in the sky and grew larger in fits and spurts. Fifty or a hundred yards away, as Antonio started to be able to make out its enormous egg-shaped dimensions, it turned onto its side, and decelerated as it approached. In the middle of the black circle, parallel with its rounded sides, a golden oval band emerged, its beam so bright that it eclipsed the headlights of the military vehicle. I don’t know them! Antonio shouted. It’s got nothing to do with me. But the soldiers had already turned their guns toward the flying object. It came to a stop in the air ten yards above their heads, where it hovered, glistening like a cosmic reflection of the lake bed. The animals seemed afraid or expectant, clinging to the Sender, which was located underneath the center of the object. It was difficult to see in the bright light, but Antonio thought that he could discern a furrowed, granite texture. He heard a dozen bullets penetrating rock before a viscous light emerged from the oval band.

  The soldiers went blurry, their guns sounded distant and irrelevant. The projectiles lost speed and dropped in the full white light. It hovered, billowing like a cloak under water, a curtain between two ages, encircling Antonio and the plants and animals. Inside there was only the scream, which was no longer dissonant. The animals pressed against the Sender, Antonio pressed against them. He could feel the earth beneath them shaking and breaking loose from the rest of the lake bed. Above their heads, the underside of the flying object transformed into an oval entryway, full of the same crystal-green light coming from the Sender, which just a few minutes ago had also come from Antonio. Now they were being sucked into it along with the loosened ground beneath them, while the air became thicker, pressing on his lungs. The oval grew and flooded his vision. The plants and animals were washed out in the light; that was now all there was: a blinding green viscous light emitted from somewhere deeper inside, and the mouthpiece throbbing excitedly in his throat.

  * * *

  —

  He awoke full of fear and gasped for air. His skeleton ached like it might collapse into a pile of bones at any moment. The wound at the base of his throat had been closed with a barely perceptible suture—it felt like his skin had been melted, spread over the incision site and left to congeal—but he could still feel the empty space where the mouthpiece had been. He coughed and it tasted like desert. When he turned his head a little to the left, he could make out the few lights still on in Rachel, and to the right, the first few yards of the desert slipping into darkness. He got back up on his legs and shook the images out of his head, set course for their camper a few hundred yards away. It was two o’clock in the morning; Fay was probably on the train somewhere between Rachel and Alamo. It was quiet, no sound or light in the sky or in the desert behind him, but he hurried anyway, pushing his legs forward with his weight, waddl
ing away with pain radiating through his bones.

  Finally home in the camper, he collapsed into his armchair. He woke up again when Fay walked through the door. The skin around her eyes was heavy and dark with fatigue, but she was radiant, her thin, copper-colored hair sticking out in all directions. Antonio fought his way out of the chair to embrace her. I met her! she said, overjoyed, before he reached her in the kitchen. Who? he asked. Karen Ruthio! said Fay, stretching out her arms. She came to me, at one point she got off the stage and came to me in the audience. “Finally, I see you,” she said, and looked me in the eye. “Yes,” I said, but did she know who I was? “Yes, we’ve met before,” she said. “When?” I asked. “We’ve met on the radio.” She really said that, Antonio! We met on the radio!

  * * *

  Karen Ruthio

  b. Gold Hill, Nevada, 1928–d. Route 95 in Esmeralda County, Nevada, 2017

  American singer-songwriter and accordionist, known for her music about life in and between American mining towns in the twentieth century.

  As the daughter, and later the wife, of a mine worker, in the majority of her albums Ruthio deals with experiences of a life lived in motion between temporary stints of work in the mines. The title track of her debut album, Dragged Through the Desert (1967), at nine minutes long, is an arrhythmical composition of violins, claves, accordions and Ruthio’s dark voice, which unfolds the image of a woman on a horse with a child on her back. The woman isn’t unfamiliar with this horse, but also doesn’t seem to be in control of it; she isn’t riding it so much as she is being pulled along, just as the horse is being pulled along; with a rope, it is tied to another horse, ridden by the woman’s husband, which seems to set their tempo and course through the desert. But it turns out that the husband’s horse is being pulled by a third horse, which is trotting even farther ahead, and so the caravan continues endlessly, the horses alternately occupied by women with children and men bearing substantial loads, and bound together by a white rope, which ends in “a hole in the earth, owned by a liar.” The pit glistens with copper as it draws the sun and the rope into it.

  Other tracks cast settled, small-town life in a nomadic light: housekeeping is revealed to be an illusion, cleaning a futile guard against the desert dust and the husband who incessantly comes home dirty from the mines; the kitchen table becomes an attempt to “empty dinner of dirt” and “lift your meals up into the sky”; teaching the girls to do housework, as well as sending the boys off with their fathers to the mines, is like passing down a burdensome skill. A number of Karen Ruthio’s songs are about a woman who wakes at night and goes outside to fall asleep again on the cold ground, or to wander around “the comic labyrinth of the town” until she knows it well enough to do it with her eyes closed, and to “reinscribe it in sleep.” Most of the time, the songs end with her leaving Earth in a spaceship or dreaming about doing so. Occasionally, other women come out and walk alongside her, and in “Woman Walks Home at Night (version 8),” it has become common practice: every night, all of the women of the town sleepwalk between the houses, discussing the town constitution, its norms and laws and their daily lives, “settling down over and over again.”