Sonora

by Hannah Lillith Assadi

  The night of the Lights, my father’s taxi shift did not end until four in the morning, but by eleven o’clock, he was home. He told us to get in the car. It reeked of marijuana. My mother complained of the smell, said her headache would surely return. My father said she should try a joint herself and then drifted into Arabic. My father vanished from his own sentences. He muttered beneath his breath. He spoke to his hands as if to ghosts.

  My mother opened the windows to freshen the air. It was winter. It was dry and cold inside the bones.

  “You know,” my father said, “I’ve survived a lot. I’ve seen ghosts, angels. Gabriel once spoke to me while waiting for the subway. I almost drowned in the sea. I’ve seen a lot, but never something like this.”

  We parked at an overlook near my mountain. In the distance, we saw Camelback Mountain, South Mountain, the thick orange pollution over Phoenix, one or two stars. The valley was always dead after ten at night, but this night we stood with hundreds of others. People had telescopes. It was an event, this longing stretched toward the night.

  “I chased it to the end. It disappeared. Huge lights, ruby lights. A triangular ship. A cluster of stars almost, but moving like the sky falling. It rose up over the Superstitions and then just covered the city, covered the sky. Everything disappeared. Then the lights turned blue. Yes blue,” my father said.

  I saw only Venus, burning white on the horizon. “Guess they just vanished, then?”

  “You see, Yusef,” my mother said.

  “Thousands of people saw it, Rachel,” he insisted.

  “I’m not feeling well. Can’t we just go home?”

  “I thought you didn’t have pain in the dark,” he said.

  My father went looking every night after that. Once his taxi shift had finished, he would drive in circles on the outskirts of town, listening to the radio, looking up. Sometimes he asked if I wanted to skip ballet and join him. “Don’t you remember what happened to us and the coyotes? Don’t you want to find out where that light came from?”

  “It was a meteor!” I said.

  “How can you be my daughter and really believe that?”

  Dance lessons lasted until nine or ten in the evening. Sometimes I would eat dinner, sometimes I would not. My mother prepared steamed broccoli and lean fish for me. My father insisted I eat red meat. “You’ll lose your brain without food,” he said. A meal to him without beef was starvation.

  I threw up at least one meal per day. Laura had taught me that with your middle finger it always works the first time. In the dressing room before rehearsals and performances, the smell of hairspray on everything, I watched the other girls undress with ease. They chatted in the nude as they applied their blush and their red lipstick. Most were petite, hairless. They were weightless, they could fly.

  The first herald of Dylan for Laura was in Mexico. Once a month, she and her father would travel three hours south so he could build new beachfront houses for rich Americans and they could meet their psychic. The psychic only did her consultations on the beach, her clients huddled around her, and only at dusk or dawn. These were the hours, Laura explained to me, that the door to the afterlife was ajar.

  Returning from Mexico, Laura’s hair lightened, aflame against her skin, she would don sombreros. She carried with her the cheap guitars she’d bought on the beach and strummed them, walking the great halls between classes, not noticing the glances or the snickers, not caring. Those days she walked with the full grace of a dancer, her footprint soft. It was what the ocean did to her, left her floating in its wake. She didn’t wash her hair for at least a week after leaving the sea.

  We met in the wash beyond the bleachers of our school to smoke after third period. Laura gave the psychic a name, Maria, and said Maria had told her something interesting at last that didn’t have to do with her father’s business or her mother’s messages from the land of the dead.

  “First, Maria told me my dark friend and I are about to enter an era of true darkness. Also that a visitor is coming to us and that we should be careful,” she whispered, though we were alone.

  “And I’m your ‘dark’ friend?” I asked.

  “Then she told me that it is my Indian blood mixed with my Irish that makes me so dangerous. That I’m a witch like my mother, but I don’t understand my power yet. That my mother was always an outcast and that I take after her. She said I have vision, that my dark friend has vision too. She said yours travels in dreams. She said we found each other for a reason, you and I. Then right after that, we were driving home, and those aliens appeared.”

  “She said I have vision?” I asked.

  “Did you see the Lights?” she asked. I shook my head. Laura exhaled her cigarette dramatically and extinguished it on the heel of one of her cowboy boots. “It looked like a ship. And the sound it made was like wind, like rushing wind. The surface was like waves. There were seven lights, and I swear they were in the pattern of the Pleiades. They were blue.”

  “On the news, they said they were red.”

  “Blue. I swear.” She nodded solemnly and clutched her locket.

  “What’s in there anyway?” I asked.

  “My mother’s ashes.” She pulled at the roots of her hair at her forehead as if trying to make it grow over her face. It was a tic she had. “Library?”

  “I’m done with my homework.”

  “I want to check out a book about how to do a séance.”

  I looked at Laura, her hair streaked magenta, her sombrero slipped fully from her small head, her eyeliner bleeding, smudged even on her cheeks, and wondered at how many lives before this life we might have known together.

  It was in the library that we found him. Dylan was wearing a bow tie and a vest, but his dress shirt was cut off above his elbows. His jeans were splattered with paint. He was much older than us, but his cheeks were puffy as a child’s. On the table before him was a pocket watch. On his left arm, there was a trail of rose-hued burn wounds, some outlined in ink. I’d never seen anyone like him, so boldly himself, the jumble of centuries in his attire.

  He looked up from what he was reading and stared into the back of a shelf as if he were peering out over a ship or promontory, looking for sea life and icebergs to rise up from the ocean. Encountering him there was like hearing a rattlesnake rustle in the bougainvillea. There was always so little warning.

  “Who is that?” Laura whispered.

  “Who cares?” I said.

  “It’s him,” she said. I pulled her arm to leave, nodding toward the exit, though I wanted her to tug back, resist me. I always did. “It’s him,” she repeated.

  “It’s some old homeless guy, Laura.”

  “He’s our fate.” Laura was already moving toward his table.

  She walked just past him, breezing his shoulder with her bag, begging him to look up and notice her, but he didn’t. She turned, confused, and opened a book from the medical shelf, pretending to intently read. She wouldn’t look up at me, though I was mouthing, Let’s go, let’s go. Finally she gave it up and dropped the book on the table where he was sitting.

  “Oops,” she said loudly. Dylan remained intent on his reading but smiled at the pages, amused.

  “Hi,” Laura said. “Do you go here?”

  “The school, no,” he said. “I don’t go to school anymore.”

  “I figured. I’m Laura.” Dylan nodded his head, licked his finger to turn a page. “And she’s Ahlam.”

  “Does she know how to speak?” Dylan peered toward me. His eyes were light green but opaque as if covered in tinted glass.

  “What are you reading?” Laura asked.

  “Stuff on alchemy.”

  “Why alchemy?”

  “It’s one of the four magical suites,” he said.

  “Why are you studying magic?” I asked.

  “She speaks,” he said. “Why do you go
to high school?” The bell rang.

  “Laura, we gotta get to class,” I said.

  “You go ahead.”

  That night, my parents had a fight. The television was on in their bedroom. I put my headphones on and could still hear the news. There had been a suicide bomb, houses demolished. There had been talks, and the collapse of talks. “Incredible, these fucking Americans show the one Israeli dead and not the hundreds of children they’ve killed,” my father shouted.

  “Are you blaming me?” my mother shouted back. “Can’t you have any pity? I have a migraine.”

  “Why do you always have to play the victim?” he asked and slammed the door. I watched him get into his taxi and idle in the parking lot. Sometimes he just did that, sat in his car for an hour with the radio on. But that night he sped out and into the street. My parents always fought when the news turned bad. They fought about grocery receipts, phone bills, the rent. But they never spoke of divorce. If they separated, they would have betrayed the thing that estranged them, the thing that made them special, what made their unhappiness holy. What made our not having any money, the fact that my mother got no inheritance from her parents except a single set of china, exceptional. At least they were rebels in a world that, with age, always sells out.

  I heard my mother shut off the television and begin to cry.

  There was a knock on my window. I flipped open the blinds.

  “Hey,” Laura said.

  “Hey.”

  “Come on. Dylan’s waiting.”

  Dylan drove a Chevy pickup from the 1970s. One of the windows had been shattered, the fender hung from the frame of the car, and a side-view mirror was missing. The floor was filled with cigarette butts and empty beer cans. I squeezed in beside Laura.

  “Where to?” Dylan asked.

  “Wherever,” Laura said.

  We drove in silence until Dylan put a cassette in the deck.

  “Are you serious? Frank Sinatra?” I said.

  “It’s classic, Ahlam.” Laura rolled her eyes at me and elongated my name. She hated Sinatra.

  Dylan was singing, paying us no attention. Then he released his hands from the wheel. “Know how to drive?” he asked. “Need to roll a smoke.”

  “Fuck,” I said. Laura began to steer. I put my hand on the wheel with her and began to shake. The voices converged from nothing at all. I heard my parents’ argument all over again. The car was vibrating, we’d lose control of it, it could go in any direction, we’d go off the road, hit a saguaro. I saw the saguaro right before us, entering the windshield. I braced. The winter lashed at me through the shattered window.

  I saw myself in the night beyond. I was crouching at the base of an ash-covered mountain. In the distance, fireworks shot up and burst apart over them. There was a boy walking out into the night, gun in hand. His hair was so white it could have been blue. He was vaguely familiar to me, though I could not see his face. Laura and I were on either side of him. Another firework shot up over us, and the boy collapsed, dead.

  “Are you okay?” Laura touched my hand, bringing me back to the car. Dylan was steering now, singing along to “New York, New York.”

  “Can we turn the heat on?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t work,” Dylan said.

  It was dark by the time we parked beside a small hill. I splashed water on my face from a half-functioning fountain. I shadowed Dylan closely as he and Laura trudged up and up.

  They kept walking. On the hill there was a swing set and a slide, set on a rubber tarp atop rocks and snake holes. Below us lay a lot of half-constructed homes. Dylan sat on one of the swings and pulled out a flask from his jacket pocket.

  “What’s in it?” Laura asked.

  “Bourbon,” he said.

  I took a sip and choked. Laura snatched it from me and held it over her mouth. “You shoot it directly back into your throat.”

  We beheld the entire valley. The smog, the dark etches of mountain in the distance, the communication towers flashing red over South Mountain, the planes dipping low into Sky Harbor Airport, and just beyond where the city ended, the Sierra Estrella.

  “You see that mountain range over there?” Laura said. “It’s called the Gateway to the Stars.”

  Dylan rolled a cigarette, his two pinky fingers delicately pointing upward as he licked the paper and sealed it.

  “Four kids disappeared there the night of the Lights. They were off-roading. And that’s exactly where the Lights disappeared. Right in those mountains.” Laura’s face was animated, and she was speaking in a higher pitch than usual. “No one has found them.”

  “What if they just got drunk and killed themselves like everyone else?” I asked.

  “Did they ever find their car?” Dylan asked.

  “Maybe the aliens took it with them. Or maybe you are an alien. Just appearing out of nowhere,” Laura said. “Maybe you killed them and used their body parts to make yourself look human.”

  “Stop that,” Dylan said and put out his cigarette. His face changed so completely from the one singing Sinatra. He looked out over the mountain as he had in the library, peering for something in the distance, in the past. Laura flushed and squeezed my hand.

  “Let’s go swing?” I said.

  “I’ll tell you a story. This was back in New York.” Dylan paused and began to roll another cigarette.

  “You never said you came from New York,” I said.

  “You never asked,” he said. “Well, I had these birds, and before I began, you know, traveling like I am now, I knew I had to get rid of them, but I didn’t just want to leave them in another cage.”

  “You smoke a lot,” Laura said.

  “This one’s for you. Maybe it will help you shut up when people are talking,” Dylan said. Laura clapped both hands over her mouth jokingly but her eyes were wet.

  “Anyways, I had to get rid of them because I was leaving. So I drove out of the city a bit with them and parked beside some woods. I sat the cage on the hood of my car and then opened it.” He lit the cigarette for Laura and pinched her cheek. She pushed his shoulder and stood up as if to run away.

  “And for the longest time they just stayed in the cage. The father would fly up a bit from his perch and peek his head out for a second, then fly back down. And then one of the little ones would do the same, but basically they all just sat there chirping a little, confused. Finally, I shook the cage a bit, screaming, like, ‘Get the fuck out!’ Finally one flew out, but he just flew to the roof of the car. Then one by one, they followed. And then one went to the nearest branch, and the others followed. Until they were gone.”

  “They were finally free,” Laura said, stilled in her attempted escape.

  “Not free. Dead. Dead in a matter of minutes. No way they’d survive the wild,” Dylan said. “But at least they got to fly.”

  The three of us lay back with our hair in the red mountain dust. I felt as if I was suddenly older. Older in one night. As if by being in proximity to Dylan, I knew things about freedom and death, drinking beers while driving, rolling cigarettes between sips of bourbon, the subway and the woods and the buildings and the parties he must have gone to in New York and sex. I felt I knew even about sex. We had something no one else did in the valley. We were special. We’d found Dylan.

  A grey sliver darted through the paloverde. Dylan jerked up and onto his knees.

  “Just a coyote,” I said.

  “That was not a coyote. That was something walking straight up. Looked like a girl, a woman. She was limping. Come on, we gotta get back to the car.”

  “It was a skinwalker,” Laura said. “But only you saw it.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” he said.

  “It’s a ghost that takes the shape of an animal. They only come after certain people and not others,” she said quietly.

  As we drove back onto S
hea Boulevard in the predawn streets, Sinatra playing, the winter with us through the broken window, Dylan rolled another cigarette and released the wheel for Laura, who steered us without fear or hesitation while I sat in the back watching the darkness depart.

  Coyotes stayed out of the roads, but when injured, they lost their sense of place. They limped slowly across the dark roads where no lights were, forgetting that the feel of asphalt on their paws meant that, in mere moments, a car would be speeding toward them from around the bend at ninety miles per hour. When the Lights passed over our desert, the coyotes returned to the banks of the canal, ever briefly, howling toward the night as if returning its call.

  When I got home from the drive with Dylan, I saw a limping coyote in the parking lot. I feared the animal was the one Dylan had seen, a ghost returned to warn me.

  The month the Lights passed over the desert and took four boys with them, there was a slew of suicides at our school. The boys that went missing in the Sierra Estrella appeared only once on the news, and in the months that passed were forgotten in the onslaught of homemade videos and photos of the Lights themselves, appearing always red and orange and never blue. The case of the missing boys was eventually closed, though no evidence of their remains or their car had ever been found.

  Four years later, a bear attacked a campsite two hundred miles south of the Sierra Estella Mountains. That same bear was cited as the culprit for the boys’ disappearance and death.

  The year of the Lights, the suicide rate in Arizona surged three times higher than the national rate. The Lights appeared to my father and Laura and to thousands of others rising up from the east over the Superstition Mountains, disappearing into the Estrella Mountains. But they never returned for me.

  The first suicide at our school, Thomas, dove into his backyard pool just as the midnight tarp was closing. He was captain of the swim team but had just been defeated at the state competitions.

  The second, Brad, whom no one seemed to know or remember, hung himself from a tree on the now shut-down elementary school playground. On the grass below him there was an empty bottle of Georgy vodka. And in his pocket, there was a note warning that the Lights were a sign, but he never said of what.