On the school bus, Sweet’N Low stood up and performed reenactments of the two deaths, whining in a girl’s voice about not being able to swim like a man or about giving blow jobs to aliens. I shared my headphones with Laura, and we put the volume up.
One morning that suicidal February, I missed the bus so my father dropped me off at school. When I exited the car, he rolled down the window and called my name. “Three things I must say to you. One, you are a beautiful dancer, but the piano will remain with you longer. Two, don’t fall in love or let anyone’s life become more important than your own.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Some women I loved, some women I left, I left in a bad way. I left because I had to leave. Maybe you have a brother somewhere,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe worse things. If my sins come back to me through you, I won’t be able to breathe. That’s history, Ahlam. It’s cyclical. Like a curse. Think about what happened to the Jews for decades, then think about the Palestinians. Find someone who loves you more than you love them.”
“Dad, I’m late,” I said.
“The third thing is that no one leaves a place for a good reason. They leave because they are fleeing from something or because they are being forced to leave. Remember what I am telling you.”
He turned the radio up after that and sped away. I heard the fading report that another bomb had exploded in Jerusalem.
My father never quit his search for Lights in the sky to take him elsewhere, as if the Lights might be a time machine, a way to pace backward through the snowbanks of time. My mother got a new job as an office secretary. In the early evenings, she played tennis. At night, while my father was out searching, my mother sat before the muted television, a movie from the fifties playing, the bashful scenes reflecting in the darkened windows that kept the desert out of our house, a bottle of wine emptied, one glass left a quarter full. I tried to wake her when I returned from dance class. She’d call me by my father’s name. I shook her again, tell her she had fallen asleep, that it was time to go to bed. It was never lonely when we all three were together. It was only lonely when it was just two. Two is the loneliest number. One can house a crowd.
The doctor retrieves us in the waiting room. My mother coughs in her sleep. The sitcom has ended. There are only the news and commercials, bombs and psychiatric drugs and airplane crashes and celebrity divorces. I shake my mother. She calls me by my father’s name. “It’s time,” I say. “He’s awake.”
The lights are off. My father’s eyelids shake. His voice is different. His accent is thick. He speaks as if he’s drunk. “It was all ocean,” he says, and then he closes his eyes again.
I beg my mother to go home and get some rest. I tell her I’ll stay. She says she’ll come back in one hour. When she returns, we will switch. I fall asleep beside my father. He stirs in his morphine sleep. And I dream for the first time in months. And in my dream we are walking, my father and I. He is leading me on a path I’ve never been on before. A path directly through a wash hidden from the roads and the subdivisions. The desert is barren, empty of cactus and brush. It is a place I’ve never seen and yet it is so close to somewhere I’ve known. My father mounts a horse and I continue walking beside him. The horse is regal, white as snow, healthy and tall. A horse fit for a prince. Gradually, as we walk, the horse weakens. His legs buckle. He grows cancer spots. The horse becomes frail as a baby until my father has to dismount and carry the horse in his arms. My father nods me on. There is still so much farther to go, he says to me.
I jump out of my chair. He stirs. I throw up acid. I vomit nothing. I thought often that it was his curse of hope to name me Ahlam, “dream,” but perhaps it was his despair at waking life.
Instead of going to the Winter Ball, we met Dylan by the reservation. Laura was wearing a short skirt and a crop top. I’d never seen her in heels. “I’m going to kiss Dylan tonight.”
“He’s so old,” I said.
Dylan was waiting for us in his truck with the lights turned off. “Get in quick,” he said. “I can’t be parked here.” Laura opened the door, got in beside him, and winked.
We took a dirt road that led into the darkness of the reservation. There were no homes or streetlights. The moon was waxing, nearly full and orange like a jack-o’-lantern. Laura pulled out a joint that she had tucked into her bra and blew smoke rings into Dylan’s mouth.
“I’m getting out,” I said. “Give me a cigarette.”
I left them in the car and squatted beneath a paloverde. I couldn’t think right. I’d never known desire, envy. I didn’t even find Dylan handsome.
I put my cigarette out on my arm. I held it for a second and then made another burn. I wanted him to know I could wound myself too. I made three in all. A star cluster.
They were blue that night. They did not hurt until morning, infected and full of puss. They have faded to the color of my skin with the years. Now one is so faint, it is barely there. But the first two remain, wilted circles in my skin.
When I returned to the car, Laura’s lipstick was smudged. But I had a scar Laura didn’t. “Wanna go to a party?” she said. She was smiling like an idiot.
“Not going to a party with children,” Dylan said.
“Please,” she cried.
They passed a bottle of something between them while I veered my head to the right and to the left and into the rearview mirror to make sure no cops were around. Then we were merging onto the highway. “This is stupid far,” I said.
“Look, the Superstitions!” Laura said.
“Look at the fucking moon. It’s red,” I said.
“Red moon apocalypse,” Dylan said. He lifted Laura’s locket from her chest. The locket was gold with a spiral of small sapphire jewels. “What’s this pretty thing?”
Laura quickly batted it down again. Somehow she believed the quarter-sized locket covered her scar. “It was my mom’s.”
“Was your mom’s?” he said.
“Yeah, before she shot herself.”
“What? You told me she died of cancer,” I said.
“I didn’t want you to think I was a freak,” she said.
“What was her name?” Dylan asked.
“Grace,” Laura said slowly as if remembering something.
“Epic scar you got on your chest.”
“I know,” she said. “I was struck by lightning.”
At the party, there was no furniture, only a single couch. The carpet smelled of liquor. There was a palm tree in the yard which waved innocently in the pale night wind. We didn’t know anyone. They were all seniors.
Laura pulled me into the bathroom as soon as we entered. “You like Dylan, don’t you?”
“I told you, he’s old,” I said.
“Good, because I’m afraid I like him so much I’ll die,” she said.
Everyone was drinking shots. Laura was already drunk and laughing, falling into Dylan. One of the boys pulled out some crumpled foil. He inhaled some powder from it. He looked elated with a secret. The foil was passed around to Laura.
“Here we go,” Dylan said.
I grabbed Laura’s wrist to pull her away, and she stuck her tongue out at me. I turned to the boy, his blond hair streaked blue. “What’s it feel like?”
He looked at me as if I’d blared a flashlight in his face. “Midnight,” he said and rolled his eyes.
Everyone began doing Jell-O shots. I realized that Laura and I were the only girls left. I finally took a shot, the cherry flavor faint against the cheap vodka, and tried not to gag. Someone shouted that the house was dry and who was going to make a beer run?
Dylan raised his hand. “But someone else has to drive.”
“Please, please come with,” Laura said to me.
I could follow the course of the night, or I could sit outside alone and wait for it all to unravel. I followed the plan. One night was lon
ger than a week in those days. One night wasn’t like all the other nights, the way it was later when I’d known the night too well and too hard.
In the car, the boy with the blond hair streaked blue ranted on about Jesus and crystal and the desert. In her hummingbird voice, Laura sang the song on the radio, “Blue American.” She rolled down the window to smoke a cigarette. “No one is dying,” she said to me. “You can stop being so serious.” Dylan kept turning from the passenger seat to stroke Laura’s thigh. I cringed when his forefinger shot up beneath her skirt.
The boy was swerving, driving his parents’ Mercedes over curbs and nearly into a stop sign. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head. I could hear her disappointment, which was worse than her anger. I wished we had gone to the Winter Ball, that I was dancing with some boy whose voice still squeaked, who had no burn wounds, no car, no stories about birds dying in the wild of the woods.
Back at the house at last, I went into the kitchen and poured the rest of the Bacardi that was there, 151 proof. It burned going down. I liked the feeling. I liked it like I liked the burns I had made on my arm. I felt carved out. I covered my eyes. Four shots in and I was blind.
It began with that first vision of Laura. The voices uttering inarticulately in my head. The violent hiss would rise and send my entire skull into an underwater uproar. It was a nightmare orchestra of the mind. I heard them again beneath the palm tree outside of the party that night of the Winter Ball. They were voices longing for a body, the voices of the dead.
When I learned to drive, the voices would erupt suddenly. I had to bear the screaming through my urge to run my car off the road. The voices commanded me: Join us. Make it quiet. It happened always at the same bend, the one I can see just ahead from the hospital room window, where the highway curves away from the reservation and the last view of my mountain is subsumed by the road walls. The desert, its darkness, was as inviting as the ocean. If you could just dive into it, you could also disappear. I tried to dance these voices off, lose my mind inside of the fierceness of a turn. Only alcohol faded the voices, as if a fan was turned on.
But I’ve survived. I know only to survive.
They took us into separate rooms. Dylan and Laura on one side of the house. The blond, blue-streaked boy and I on another. I blacked out. When I came to, shortly past dawn, the stranger was staring at the drawn blinds that led to the porch, his face clenched. He was not crying. Not speaking of Jesus and crystal and the brilliant endurance of the saguaro without rain and the coldness of February. He was still, as if asleep with his eyes open.
My grey panties were ripped and lying beside me. There was a pain between my legs that resembled hunger more than soreness. We lay on nothing but a sheet. His jeans were crumpled at his ankles, and his wife-beater was stained with sweat. I grabbed my underwear and stuffed them into my bag.
“What’s your name?” he said when I got to the door.
“Ariel,” I said.
I ran across the house. One door was cracked open. Laura was alone, awake. She pushed down the covers and rolled over naked to reveal the sheets below. I saw the scar on her chest for the first time in the light. It was scarlet. I saw the blondish-reddish hair tangled at her groin, contrasted against her caramel skin. So little of her seemed of her father.
“Is there a lot of blood?” she asked.
“Only a few drops.”
“He left this,” she said and crumpled a piece of paper into her bag. “And some money.”
In the afternoon, it is said that a woman’s face with long, flowing hair emerges on the rocks of the mountain my father named for me. Others say that it is the face of Jesus. It is a desert upon which each of us projected a different delusion. Laura told me that the tribe her mother descended from would not utter the names of their children from age ten until marriage, and would never utter the names of the dead, and that this was why Indian graves were unmarked. She told me she learned of this too late, while wandering into the reservation and meeting three young boys who told her in the middle of hide-and-go-seek she’d come to a terrible death if she told them her name. And so, she told me, it was that day she went by Laura and not her birth name, and she would go by it until betrothed.
But Laura was never married. Laura was never Laura.
The morning I found those grey cotton panties beside me, I began to go by another name, a name once used for cover on the Superstitions where my father and I found ourselves lost years before. I thought this might mean I would never be hunted again.
Laura and I took anything we could find in that house. We counted thirty-seven bucks, a CD collection, a pager. We called a cab. I wanted her to get in ahead of me. To wave me in. There was only one taxi service I knew, my father’s. For a moment, through the window of that house, I thought I saw him in the driver’s seat, though I knew his shift was long over.
I walked out onto the porch and saw everything from the night before. An empty pack of cigarettes on a lawn chair, bottles on the counter. I hid behind the palm tree.
“Come on,” Laura said. “It’s okay.” As we drove away, I watched the Superstitions disappear in the rearview mirror.
“Laura, look,” I said. “There’s snow on the mountains.”
“Don’t look back,” she said. “It’s bad luck.”
I wished I could reverse time, erase the night. I wished for a fata morgana to reveal itself floating above the desert, another land to which we could go.
Laura interrupted my thoughts. “Can’t believe it. No goodbye, nothing.”
“What’s on the piece of paper?” I said.
“An address in New York,” she muttered.
“What an asshole.” I touched her arm. “Leaving money like you’re some whore.”
“It was for the cab, stupid,” she snapped.
“I didn’t have a great time, either. Thanks for asking,” I said. We remained quiet until the cab pulled off the highway.
“I’m sorry. Sometimes it feels like some crazy beast lives in me,” she said. I rolled down the window and wished the cold air on my face was water, washing the night off me.
“What do you remember about New York?” she asked. I stuck my head out and let the wind take my hair and drown out her voice.
“Please tell me something, anything,” she said. “I’m dying.”
“There it’s really February,” I said at last, and then, thinking of my snow globe, my only false memory of New York, added, “and right now there is a woman, and she is walking between the tall buildings through a snowstorm. And it is quiet because the snow quiets everything. Someday she will be me. Someday I’ll get the fuck out of here.”
“Let me come with you,” she said.
The cab dropped us off at the entrance to the reservation. We walked into it. I puked red in the lifting lavender. Laura held my hair back. “I want to die,” I said.
“Did you finally earn your blow job girl title?” she asked and put her fingers to the creases of my lips, cleaning away the vomit. I pulled my sleeve up my arm to reveal the burns I had done. “Did he do this to you?”
I shook my head. The pain suddenly announced itself everywhere. Laura kissed my skin just beside the wounds. “What day is it even?”
I knew it was Sunday.
“You ever heard of that song ‘Gloomy Sunday’?” Laura said. “It was this really beautiful song. So beautiful it caused, like, a hundred people to commit suicide in the thirties.”
Laura began to hum as she had the night I met her. As she did every day I knew her.
“Be quiet. Did you hear that?” I said. “Sounds like a firework just went off.”
“Or a gun,” she said gazing toward the mountains in the east. “Look, it’s another day.”
III
April
The saguaros were everywhere scattered like crucifixes against the sky, endless and ancient, and in
the half-light cast human shadows on the dust. Their arms were cast forth, cheerfully upright, blossoming come April, until dying or struck by lightning and stripped to skeletons. When we left on drives in the mountains and gained elevation, the saguaro would disappear, and when we returned, my father would scream, “I saw it first!” of the first saguaro seen, and we would know we were near home.
That Sunday, after the Winter Ball I never attended, my father found me in the living room tearing a piece of bread apart and told me to get in the car. We were going to see some snow. In the woods two hours north, it had already melted, but the weather was so completely different, crisp and mountainous, it was enough to feel I had left the night behind.
As we descended into the valley, the radio signal returned. Drifting in and out of a dreamless sleep, I heard the news of the final suicide. He must have driven after Laura and me, because at dawn, the boy with blue-streaked hair pulled into his parents’ garage, parked his car at their mansion that bordered the reservation, took off his jeans, his stained shirt, unlocked the safe that held his father’s old service pistol, walked out into the desert, put the gun into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
Laura did not call. She waited at Starbucks, knowing I would come. The American madness of it all, our sitting at the local Starbucks counting deaths. I sat down next to her and plugged my fingers through the wire tabletop. She rolled a cigarette toward me.
“I think it’s time to disappear to Mexico,” she whispered. “Or we’re next.”
“It’s like a curse,” I said.
Laura’s mascara had leaked beneath her eyes. She’d been crying. I couldn’t tell if it was her hands or my hands shaking the table or if the entire world was shaking, a sudden earthquake. “This happens in lots of places you know. People getting shot, people dying. It’s normal.”
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