My mother calls, asks where I am. She begs me to come back inside, to smoke less. She says we need to comfort each other. The reservation, once empty and vast, now has three casinos with trailing LED lights as facades. The facades broadcast the falling leaves of elsewhere. They are the tallest buildings in the valley but are Legos beside the mountains. Their parking lots are full. Before them stand new office buildings, new malls, a structure made to resemble a flying saucer, a butterfly museum, another Walmart. I make out two stars.
In high school, I learned to dress my eyes with thick kohl. I learned to smoke when Laura told me that tobacco was used as a shroud for those who walked in the underworld. She said that the indigenous people of this land knew how to use it, but the white man destroyed it. I used too many bobby pins to tie up my too-long hair. All of these things are still with me: eyeliner, bobby pins, tobacco. With the years, we become even more ourselves and call this change.
I wore black or charcoal grey, tones of rain and the night sky. Laura had outgrown her magenta skirt, but she’d found others equally bright. In bad moods, she wore grey. Never black. She drew skulls on her palms in colored pens, and I weekly helped her apply a temporary tattoo of a coyote to her upper arm. “My spirit animal,” she said when I first peeled back the paper from her skin.
She wore rings on every finger—turquoise, lapis, fake rubies. Her nail polish was always half picked off, tiny islands of color. Only one nail was not chewed off, preserved for the guitar. She wore spider web tights in the summer. In winter, she wore coyote fur. The walls of her room were covered in old newspaper clippings, sightings of the mythological La Llorona and other supernatural phenomena in various ghost towns throughout the desert. She had a cabinet devoted to stolen goods from the mall: underwear, blush, perfume, dream catchers. Laura always wore a choker made of rope with a dangling cross and locket. In her upper half, she was a dancer, her neck long and elegant, her chest puffed out prettily. But her lower half gravitated to earth, full hipped, her feet flat and awkward as any bird. I did not recognize her as pretty as a child. It was only when we were older that her face became unavoidable, handsome and primal.
At school, Laura and I were sometimes called goths, sometimes gross lesbians, sometimes just witches or freaks. For lunch, we sat together beside a large window that looked out onto the desert. On the way home, we took the school bus. A group of boys sat in the back, railing on the girls in the front seats. Among them was the son of a popular English teacher who went by the nickname Sweet’N Low and liked to ask girls crude questions about various sexual acts. We had escaped his attention for weeks until the day he sat down in an empty seat behind me and said, “Hey, goth girl, tell us what a blow job is.”
I looked to Laura for help, but she was humming, staring out the window. He waited a moment and then stood, took a bow, and yelled, “Ladies and gentleman, I present you with the blow job girl.” This was followed by a chorus from the back of the bus: Blow job girl, blow job girl. Laura lunged at him and tore at his face with her strumming nail.
“What the hell?” Sweet’N Low looked as if he was going to cry. She had barely drawn blood. “You’re fucking crazy.”
“I dare you to tell on me,” she said, then resumed her humming trance at the window.
I got off the bus at Laura’s stop, one stop earlier than my own. Laura walked ahead of me and toward the entrance of the reservation.
“You live here?” I asked.
“My mother did,” she said. “But my father’s white, so we don’t.”
“You think he’ll tell the bus driver?”
She shook her head and looked darkly toward the bus as it pulled away.
“Try not to walk on the cracks,” she said. “See how I’m doing.”
“Why?”
“That’s where ghosts live.”
“I’m the other way,” I said and nodded in the direction of my apartment complex.
“See you tomorrow, blow job girl,” she said and flicked my arm.
The popular kids all sat in the center of the lunch hall on showcase. The rest of us found corners to hide in. Trevor sat in the center of the center, flanked by the cheerleaders on one side and the football team on the other. Trevor lived in my apartment complex. Because his parents were waiting for their mansion to be finished, he explained to me.
At the apartment complex, Trevor and I saw each other at the pool. The water was green from lack of maintenance and ridden with paloverde branches. Trevor would clasp his hands over my mouth, dunk me in, hold me there until I kicked and fought to come up. Some afternoons, he would lodge himself on top of me on the lounge chairs, straddling me, his daily white shirt still wet from the pool, his fingers smelling of sweat and dust. Some afternoons he would rock back and forth on my lower belly. Despite my cries for him to get off, an unwelcome purring took me. I’d never been touched.
But Trevor did not speak to me at school. He pretended not to know me. Trevor was a punter on the team at our high school. He drank beer. He was a star.
One night after a football game, Laura led me to a party where Trevor was. When we approached the keg, Trevor asked loudly who invited the freaks. I flushed. Laura walked toward him and grabbed a fistful of his hair and pulled.
“Who let this Mexican trash in here?” Trevor screamed.
“Assholes,” she cried as we ran outside.
We walked through the wash to the edge of the reservation in silence. Laura sat down on a stone and handed me a beer she had stolen from the party. “Wanna dance?” she asked.
“I hate people,” I said.
Beneath the moon, she faux-waltzed before me. “Just imagine there are thousands of couples, music playing. The ocean is just off in the distance. Don’t you like long sunset walks on the beach?”
I laughed from the one beer it took me to be drunk. “Have another?” I shook the can.
“I have this,” she said and pulled out a water bottle that smelled more like rubbing alcohol than spirits. Laura began to dance awkwardly again, her hair spinning more prettily than her body. I gurgled the drink and spit it into the rocks. She fell toward me, dizzy.
“Wanna see something weird?” Laura lifted her shirt up, revealing a lavender bra that was too large for her small breasts. Her chest was scarred faintly red in the pattern of tree veins. “I was struck by lightning as a child,” she said. “For most people, the scar disappears after a few days or a month. But mine never faded.”
“It’s sort of pretty,” I said, wishing I had some mark to show of my own.
“But what if it’s some sort of curse? Or, like, a map to a constellation where there are aliens?”
“Or a map to the gold in the Superstitions,” I said.
“Yeah, right. There’s no gold there, just ghosts.” She kneeled down and put her finger to a cactus needle. The blood bubbled like ink and trailed off her hand into the dirt. “Come here,” she said. Before I knew it, she had taken my finger to a spine then pressed it into hers. “Now you have a scar too.”
“Hardly,” I said.
“With this prick, we are blood sisters. Together forever.”
I have always loved those with beautiful scars. My father was born with a mark beneath his calf he claims is the exact shape of his homeland. I wonder if the doctors ever notice, if they wonder at a body, its marks of particularity, its pinpricks of love, of drunken stumble, of bruise. Or if in their haste to save our lives, it is only our blood pressure, our liver function, our heart rate that concern them. If an alien beheld the earth and saw us scrambling for the rush-hour train, pumping gas at the local station, slowed in the highway traffic, our bombs fireworking the sky, they might think we are the scars. We are the wounds. This is why aliens always appear in the desert. It is empty. It is clean.
I snuck out with Laura in the night. We could not drive, so we got picked up. We snuck under gates and climbed over w
alls. We walked through the desert by night. Laura taught me to suck on pennies if drunk and caught by cops. Laura instructed me about the various ways in which I could bring myself to orgasm, her favorite being lying beneath a bath faucet. She told me of the ointments witches rubbed onto their broomsticks, shoving the ends far into themselves. “Witches never really flew, Ahlam. They were just getting off.”
The image of us that remains forever is always in a stranger’s car, the windows down, Laura singing, my hands wet with fear. Like the night Laura was singing along to a song called “Blue American.” The boy driving was coming down off meth. Dylan would have been in the passenger seat.
I’d never seen what it meant to come down until I saw the boy, his blond hair streaked blue, collapse into maniacal tears at what he called the beauty of Jesus and the desert in the middle of the night and crystal. And crystal.
Laura squeezed my hand and rolled down the window to smoke a cigarette. “Don’t be so serious,” she said. “No one’s going to die. Have a little fun.”
I had asked the boy who wept what it felt like, crystal meth, the prettiest name for a drug beside heroin. Crystalline methamphetamine. His head fell back. He closed his eyes, then opened them. “Come on, you know . . . you’re just high as fuck.” Then in a dramatic whisper: “Everything goes silent like a midnight of the mind.”
My father punished me as a child with what he called the “silence jail.” When I got into trouble or threw a tantrum, he would tell me to go into my room and “practice silence.” When an hour of silence had passed, he would come into my room, sit down on my bed and tell me the same story he’d told me the last time. When his family left Palestine, he was smuggled out in the night in his mother’s arms at four days old. “Silence is my first memory,” he would say. “My mother had her hand over my mouth to muffle my cries. What baby is not allowed to cry at birth? That is silence. That is real silence. Do you see how lucky you are? A child in America. No war. Just peace and prosperity and a beautiful, big desert to play in.”
My mother never spoke of home, never spoke of missing it. My mother never remembered her dreams. My mother only ever missed New York. My mother could never stand silence.
My mother is licking an empty M&Ms bag. She does this when she is nervous—licks her empty plate or an empty package of candy or chips. The television murmurs on in the waiting room. A sitcom plays. A family is driving somewhere, the children roll their eyes, the father honks at a stoplight. Their house is large. Its yard has a tree. They have a dog. They have God. I hold my mother’s shoulder, and we watch the scenes unfold. “Do you think you’ll ever have a child?” she asks me.
“It’s not something I’m considering at the moment,” I say.
“Well, you don’t want to get too old.”
I walk toward the television and turn the volume up. “I’m twenty-three.”
“You are just like your father.” She begins to cough, a dry, achy cough she’s had for years. “I was married at your age,” she says hoarsely. “Don’t worry about the cough. Everyone has it here. Valley fever.”
“You know, they’re planning to round up all the wild horses,” I say. “Did you hear about that? That they are going to round up all the wild horses on the reservation and otherwise dispose of them?”
“So they’ll send them somewhere else?”
“‘Otherwise dispose of’ means kill them, Mom.”
“Don’t be morbid,” she says.
“But it’s the truth,” I say.
There was a game my parents played as I grew up. My father would blast the news even through dinner. He would only turn it off when the local newscasters came on to broadcast game scores, the rising temperature throughout the week, puppy shows, and celebrity sightings. He would also turn it off when the president spoke. But if there was news from Iraq, Kuwait, Israel, or Palestine, there would be no reprieve.
My mother would take the remote to mute it, pleading he wait until we were finished with dinner. My father would stand, get a glass of water, and put the volume back up. My mother would talk to me about my homework, my dance class, her voice rising in volume to compete with whatever reporter was on the screen. My father cursed in Arabic in response to the same reporter delivering his requisite dose of tragedy.
My mother would rise from her seat, collect the dishes, our meals half eaten, and rinse the plates loudly at the sink. Midway through the clatter, my father would say, “But I wasn’t finished.”
One morning, Trevor was on the news. He was missing. My father flipped the television off. “Aren’t there more important things in the world to report?”
“I’ve seen that boy around,” my mother said and turned it back on.
“These fucking Americans,” my father said and muted the volume.
It remained muted through scenes of floodlights focused on the desert in the area they believed Trevor had wandered into. Floodlights combing up and down the hills, illuminating only brush and saguaro and emptiness, hovering for a moment, hoping for leg or arm or dash of human hair, only to find the movement to be wind in a paloverde branch.
When the principal announced the news about Trevor, my blood turned electric. I rushed from class into the bathroom. I sat on the toilet seat and shut my eyes. My hands were damp. My veins wormed beneath my skin. Something was rocking over me. My belly down to my groin, warm. I smelled rust. The voices were taking over. And then I was at the canal. There was no high school. We were swimming in it. The water was clear as a pool. The bodies intermingled with fish and sunken cacti. Trevor made waves. Kids were running between the paloverde. Laura appeared from the brush. I pulled myself out of the water to greet her.
The sky turned grey and snow began to fall. The trees covered as if by fleece. The water froze over. Everyone was still as statues. Except for Laura and me, it was a sudden graveyard. The sky fell to dusk. Laura tiptoed onto the icy canal. I tried to shout but could not speak, and so I knelt down on the banks with my head tilted up to swallow the snow just as the ice shattered slowly and as helplessly as glass. When I looked at Laura again, she was knocking heavily upon the frozen surface as if upon a door.
For the first time, there was blood in my underwear. I went home from school early.
Laura called when I did not return the next day. “They found him,” she said.
“Oh?” I said hopefully.
“Dead. The whole school is wearing black just like you, A.”
“Oh my God, Laura.”
“You better come back before they think you did it.”
Trevor was the first to die. He wandered away from the party hours after Laura and I had left. Wandered miles into the desert much farther than the path she and I had taken home. It took four days for a policeman on horseback to follow a trail of blood that led to a lot of abandoned, half-constructed homes. There he found Trevor bled to death, the honey brown of his skin pale, his lips blue as his eyes. Lacerations ran the length of his arm. He was missing his clothing and his shoes. The news blamed the coyotes.
There was never further investigation. We heard that his mother was seeking out psychics and mediums. Laura and I saw her sometimes sitting at the newly opened Starbucks deep in conversation with women, examining tarot cards, her face red with tears. Trevor’s parents moved out of the apartment complex a week after his death. Their mansion must have been complete. Rumors circulated that the women told his mother Trevor was wandering still, that he had something to say.
When we arrived, before the high school was built, before the coyotes disappeared, we ate dinner on the porch of our apartment and watched the sunset splashing crimson and lavender across the brush. A hush came over the desert at that hour. Once it was dark, the hush would be corrupted by howling. The coyotes were hungry. My father bought two extra steaks and left them raw in plastic bags. It was a secret we kept from my mother. The nights she was at work, I held his hand an
d followed him out of the apartment complex and into the desert. We walked by moonlight or flashlight up until we reached the canal. Here the dirt path stopped. The desert was everywhere, empty but for the coyotes. The bag dripped in my hands, and the pink blood left them sticky, smelling of iron and sweat. “Do not be afraid. They will not bite. They are scared more than us,” my father said.
Every night we came, carefully navigating the cactus, listening to the coyotes whisper against the brush, their silver coats marring the dark. Every night they came closer to us, until at last we could stand right before them, their sweaty noses wetting our hands. “You give back to your home so that it doesn’t come for you. You look it eye to eye,” my father said.
Every night we came until the night the coyotes gathered around us, only to suddenly scatter. We looked up, and there was a blur of light crashing toward us. For an instant the sky turned brighter than morning. My father picked me up and ran for home.
II
February
The land is old. The land is rumored to be full of vortices and voids, of paths into the underworld, and landmarks of landings from other worlds. We settled in by renaming the mountains. My father chose a mountain for me. It is known to everyone else as Fire Rock after its reddish hue. The mountain has jagged drops between rising peaks. From the hospital, I spot its silhouette as the last light escapes the valley, and trace the difficulty of its lines and wonder at my father for choosing such a broken mountain to call by my name.
Dylan arrived in our lives with the Phoenix Lights. The Lights were the lights everyone saw, and they appeared over the Superstitions in the east, the home of the Apache underworld, and disappeared over the Estrella Mountains. The week we met him, I remember that my mother had a migraine every day. She remained on the couch in the dark while my father juiced lemons on her temples and forehead. He read the Quran over her. She begged him for migraine medicine. “But it’s poison, pure poison,” he said. “Your migraines are a spiritual problem.”
Sonora Page 2
