Sonora

by Hannah Lillith Assadi

  “I have three hundred dollars saved,” she said, looking into the storm. “You see that in the distance? Looks like it’s a piece of curtain waving about. That’s La Llorona.”

  “Three hundred dollars is nothing, Laura.”

  “Maybe, but maybe not,” she said. “So the story goes Llorona’s husband left her for another woman, so she drowned her children for revenge and then killed herself. But the gods wouldn’t let her into heaven unless she could show them her kids. So she stalks the desert looking for other children to bring to the afterlife. Beware of the mistress, Maria always said, weeping, in the howl of the August monsoons.”

  My mother pulls the car to the side of the road just beside the canal. “Why don’t you drive? I’m too upset.”

  I take the wheel. I pull back out onto Shea Boulevard. We pass through mountains suddenly. “You remember that it’s Yom Kippur tomorrow?” my mother says.

  “I forgot about it,” I say.

  “Well, you should say a prayer.”

  The fatigue and the sadness has me drunk, and the speed of the car in my hands feels good in a way that doesn’t terrify for the first time in years. My mother closes her eyes, falls nearly asleep but still tells me to slow down as we drift into the town beyond the hills, its strange constellations of homes stretched between darkness.

  By morning, everything was grey swept, the prickly brush swathed in rain. Inhaling the fumes of the storm, the greened soil, the sage, I knew beauty for me would only ever be derived from loss. I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.

  “I’ll miss this,” I said.

  Laura said nothing and turned the car radio on. The rain had cooled the desert. We sang together. I screamed beside her, singing though I did not know the words. The entire desert still slept. One woman appeared with her dog, jogging in the first light. We approached the canal. The wash at its side was flooded. There was an ambulance parked on the banks.

  “Slow down a second,” Laura said.

  Another ambulance rushed toward us. Laura undid her seat belt and stood up through the sunroof. “Looks like they’re rescuing someone from the canal,” she said drearily.

  “When we first got here, my father and I used to walk right up to this side of the canal and feed coyotes at night,” I said.

  “Oh, where have all the coyotes gone to?” Laura crooned.

  Laura and I drove through the sunrise, a sunrise gaudy in its fuchsia and indigo. In a few hours, everything would be cleaned up. The ambulance would disperse. The scene at the canal would gradually become as oblivious as the morning’s clear sky.

  Too many had died. It was against all statistical odds. I thought it was the landscape so lonely it pained us, so beautiful it urged us to accidental suicide. Atop the mountains that faced the old apartment complex was a radio tower. When I first saw it, I imagined it to be a signal that recovered the movements of aliens and spaceships, hovering over us, always waiting for the right moment to take us up and out.

  It’s dawn by the time we park in the hospital. The storm never comes. I turn off the ignition. As if on cue, my mother and I both remain in the car.

  “We were just a normal family, so normal that we had dinner together every night,” my mother says. “Is this the right lot?”

  “You already forgot?” I say.

  “We should all take a trip somewhere,” my mother says. “I need to see the ocean. I need to get out of here. You’ve been gone so long, you forget what it’s like to live without seeing water.”

  It only took a few hours for the heat to rise past a hundred and ten degrees. Everything was brittle and cracked. When I got home, I heard the sound of wood being dragged across the tile floor, the sound of struggling and banged glass. My father was cursing to himself in Arabic. Sharmut was whining, running back and forth through the hall as if chasing and then being chased by an invisible beast. My mother was hitting the table over and over again as if this might stop him.

  I asked my father what he was doing. “We won’t need this anymore,” he screamed. His face was red, and his arms were already bruised from handling the weight.

  He left the piano in the middle of the yard, the dead August grass sunken down around its legs. Shortly afterward, it began to rain again. My mother begged him to save the piano.

  My father slammed the door to the garage and got into his car. “It’s not about you, Rachel! She is spoiled, our daughter, and has to learn what happens when you give up your dreams. Dancing is for prostitutes. New York is for whores who stay out all night.”

  I covered myself up in a quilt. I was suddenly cold. My father returned. He stomped into the living room and pulled the television from the wall and then was out the door. “Out with the trash,” he yelled. “You ready to go?”

  “Where were you all night?” my mother asked.

  “Somebody died,” I said.

  “Are you on drugs?”

  We drove to the airport in my father’s taxi. We were approaching the terminal when my father finally spoke. “I only had one friend in New York, a poet from my hometown. He was very famous. But we were refugees. Aliens. So it didn’t matter I was nobody. I couldn’t see him unless I brought him a bottle of vodka. He was the best poet alive, but he had his ways. Vodka or nothing. The last night I saw him, after we finished the bottle, I was going and he said to me, ‘Yusef, New York will ruin you.’ He said to me, ‘It ruins everyone eventually.’”

  “That’s not true,” my mother said.

  “He burned to death that night. Left his cigarette going. Burned in his own apartment. No one came to save him. No one cared he was a famous poet. No one cared until the flames were in the hall. No one thought anything when they smelled smoke. That’s New York for you.”

  My father unlocked the door and put the car into park. When I got out, he rolled down the window. “Always take a taxi, Ahlami.”

  My mother jumped out of the car. “This is yours now.” It was the ring she wore always that I adored most, a gold band with three onyx stones.

  I sat in the window seat of the airplane. Laura was next to me, her head on my shoulder. The voices spiraled through my mind like migrating sparrows. I had no brain. I was a segue for the birds to pass through. My head was full of them. I looked down at the desert disappearing through the clouds and squeezed my eyes shut.

  I was outside in my parents’ yard before the piano. I opened its sheath. The keys moved without me. The wind picked me up from beneath my armpits. I wanted to be back on the ground but couldn’t. I tried to move, tried to dance, tried to land. The music was beautiful. I couldn’t move my limbs. The keys, I saw from this height, were made of bones. Everything below me, the desert, a graveyard.

  The music turned ugly. I couldn’t do anything but rise, pinned like a cross by the wind. I was made of stars. The sky was thick, dull, grey, impenetrable.

  I came to at the sound of my mother’s voice calling my name. But there was only Laura there, humming a song I did not know. And then we were coming down.

  It was bright and cloudless as we flew over New York. From the plane I saw a hint of the skyline before we turned and passed over the Atlantic, then looped back toward the shore. We saw figures on the beach, figures in the waves. Boats were making their slow journey across the ocean. By the time we left the airport, the sky had turned a menacing grey. The rain made a clanking music on the subway tracks. Laura had insisted we take the train.

  There were only a few people waiting. It seemed like such a quiet scene, almost abandoned. There was a man walking toward nowhere between the train tracks and a metal gate. Marsh consumed his path. Everything in the street below us was closed except a single bar named after the station. A seagull swooped down and landed on the platform. I could smell the ocean.

  It did not conform to the vision
of bustle and elegance and light I associated with New York. A woman walked to the edge of the track and leaned over it. There was no train. She was dressed in all black. Her face was solemn, her eyes wet. She lit a cigarette.

  “We’re home,” Laura said.

  Finally the train arrived, creeping forth as if there were traffic ahead. Laura mocked the sound of the doors opening and closing. She did a cartwheel on the floor of the car and crashed into a seat, laughing.

  I sat by the window watching the endless graves just beyond the A train’s tracks while she studied the map. Then the train submerged. When the doors opened, I loved the smell. The musk of the underground—it was sordid, teeming with life. “Do you notice how no one is looking at anyone else?” Laura said. “It’s amazing.” She was pacing the length of the car pretending to read the ads.

  “You’re nervous about seeing him,” I said.

  “I know you are, but what am I?” she said in a childish voice, then frowned. “I can’t figure out the map.”

  I had written out the directions on my palm. From delivering pizzas with her, I knew Laura had no talent for maps. She would take a left three turns too late, miss freeway exits, and then argue with the road as if it had changed overnight.

  We switched to the F train, and after a few stops, the train suddenly bore itself up above Brooklyn. The skyline was before us. Those buildings at last so close were a magic trick, and in the last light, they glittered through the mist, regal and secretive. The emerald arm of the Statue of Liberty shot through the screen of rain. The Twin Towers cradled the moon between them before the clouds again disappeared half the sky. We were going in the opposite direction, though, toward a flattened land, factory smoke, graffiti scrawled on old warehouses. A canal. As we exited the train, a man begging for change boarded. His face had been burned off so badly the contours between nose and cheek and mouth were gone.

  Only a few cars passed us. There was a bodega on the corner, an ancient sign on its exterior advertising cold beer, cigarettes, chips. Two men sat in lawn chairs at the train exit in front of the single brownstone on the street. They were covered by a large umbrella stand decorated with cacti. Before them was a large cardboard box of watermelons.

  “Evening, sirs,” Laura said.

  They tipped their hats. From the looks of it, they were father and son. “Do you know where a Dylan lives?” Laura asked. They nodded us in the direction of the canal.

  “Down there,” the son said. “Then left.”

  As we crossed the street, the father called after us, “Careful now.”

  We turned off into an alley that ran along the canal and opened onto a large parking lot. There was the old Chevy Dylan had driven us in years earlier in the center of the lot with its roof charred. Its bed was covered now by a tent. It was going nowhere ever again. The sound of the above-ground train screeched overhead, leaving us for its journey to the sea. A stray cat approached me, nestling against my leg. Shards of glass lay in a thick carpet on the asphalt. Mosquitoes swarmed from puddles. A large boulder painted purple with an X sat in front of the door atop a rain-worn American flag. Dylan had written there: So beautiful, we have built the crucifix on which we hang.

  “Did you get lost?” Dylan said. He crawled out of the tent on the truck and walked toward us. He was taller and thinner than when he left. His hair had strands of grey. His presence suddenly made things feel off-kilter, gorgeous as if being crushed in lush velvet while cascading off the edge of a cliff.

  “It’s beautiful here,” Laura said.

  “Well, here we are again,” he said and looked around as if he too had only just arrived. “Let’s go in?”

  I had never seen such large windows. Every change of the sky was painted before us. The trains passed, and their lights swept into the loft. Inside it smelled like a leftover fire and dirty laundry. Chandeliers were sprawled across the ceiling like a canopy of trees, their bulbs blue. There was a single bed in the middle of it all like a stage. Shattered mirrors hung from the walls in place of decoration. Dylan had written phrases all over his walls in various colors of spray paint: abandoned altars, apocalypse tango, we, the pretty fallen angels, alchemy: shit = gold, garbage truck booty call, the oceans of Europa, midnight in the Y2K, and a nod to us, perhaps: the Phoenix Lights.

  The entire space was filled with broken instruments. There were three out-of-tune pianos and four guitars that were missing strings. An accordion lay out of its case on the window ledge. Dylan opened three beers with a lighter and handed them to us. He took up one of the guitars and began to restring it. “Won’t you play something for us, Laura?” he said.

  “If she dances,” Laura said, looking at me.

  Dylan finished his beer and walked out the door into the lot. We heard the glass crash against the concrete. “Therapy,” he said when he returned.

  Laura began fiddling with the guitar, touching a string, winding the bolts on the head to tune. “Give it to me,” Dylan said. “I’ll play. You sing. Ahlam dances.”

  “It’s Ariel,” I said. Dylan looked at me ironically.

  “I prefer Ahlam” he said. “More exotic.”

  He played a dark, repetitive tune, vaguely oriental. He did not look at us, just down at the instrument, swaying his head, his eyes fluttering shut. Laura hummed lowly at first, looking at me angrily to fulfill my role in the trance of our first night. She pulled me to her. We spun around each other, laughing. I chaînéd from her swiftly and bowed. She rubbed her legs with her hands as if trying to clean them and then began to sing “La Llorona” to the tune of Dylan’s playing. She howled the song, louder than I’d ever heard her, conjuring all angels and all devils, her young voice husky and ancient, and as she did, I watched Dylan watching her, his gaze fixed on the new exceptional animal occupying his home. Then he looked at me.

  “Your friend is going to be a star,” he said. “Let’s go make a fire.”

  Dylan began picking up pieces of wood. A cat hissed at him, its tail growing large, its eyes red, and ran toward the canal. “You know,” he said, “I had this uncle on my mother’s side. Well, my uncle never slept. He’d go out to the bar for three days in a row, leaving my aunts and cousins in the house. He spent days drinking and would come home finally, maybe on the third or fourth day, having not slept, and he’d sit up all night for another seven days drinking vodka and making fire after fire after fire in the yard, winter or summer, until his wife came out and screamed at him to put it out, but he couldn’t hear her. It was like he was in a trance. He didn’t speak or sleep.”

  “That’s a strange story,” I said.

  “That’s who I come from. Strange people. So how long are you ladies planning to be in New York?”

  “We come from even stranger people than you,” Laura said.

  “Maybe a year?” I said.

  Dylan walked toward me. “Can I see this?” he asked. Before I could answer, he slipped my mother’s ring off me, and fit as much as he could onto his blistered and bruised finger. “What a pretty thing this is,” he said. “But it’s not black diamond. And what are you doing here in New York? What are you looking for?” Without waiting for my answer, he slipped off the ring. “Now we are forever connected.”

  “We’re escaping hell,” Laura said. She looked hurt by the brief redirection of attention.

  “When I met you girls,” Dylan said, “I thought I had a demon in me. I wanted to live with the Hopis in the high desert. That’s why I left you guys so abruptly.” Dylan blew on the flames, making the fire go. “But they wouldn’t even talk to me. I drove all the way up there to the high desert and pleaded with them to just tell me something, anything. Someone I knew had died and . . . well, they just looked at me like I was speaking another language. Finally one of the kids walked up to me. I thought I had finally broken through.”

  “Had you?” Laura said.

  “The kid told me I was an a
sshole.” Dylan laughed. “So I came back here. That’s the good thing about New York. It never rejects the impure. In fact, it does the opposite.”

  “I’m trying to be a dancer,” I said. “To return to your earlier question.”

  “And she’s so pure about it,” Laura said.

  “Trying?” he said. “You either are or you aren’t. Never say ‘trying to be’ in this city. You’ll end up a drug-addicted failure. Trust me. Always say ‘I am’ even if you don’t believe it yourself.”

  Wind blew the fire toward the canal, extinguishing most of it. Laura took up the ax to split another log.

  Dylan halted her with his arm. “Tonight you ladies take the bed. I’ll sleep in the truck.”

  I woke up to the sound of the trains passing over us every few minutes. Laura was still snoring. Dylan was sitting at the piano with a beer. The sheath was closed, but he was moving his head like some mad conductor.

  “I think it was Van Gogh who said the only cure for suicide was to breakfast on a glass of beer and a slice of bread,” he said.

  “I barely slept,” I said.

  “Oh, you must be a normal person,” he said. “One of those people who thinks they need sleep.”

  My mother and I sleep on either side of my father. I do not know what we will do when it will be just the two of us. Will she still want to shop? Will I still smoke so much?

  It’s morning in the hospital. I hear the nurses chatter, the heightened frequency of footsteps in the hall. Phones are ringing. Televisions are turned on. I wake up but know that the room is still full of ghosts. Everything whispers. The way voices sound in an old bar, the music turned off, the night ripped from them by morning. I was kissed in one dream. I was running up a flight of steps that went on forever, looking for someone who would die if I didn’t make it to the top in time.

  I catch the reflection of my face in the steel sink. I stand up and hold my father’s hand. His eyes open. “I’m alive?” he asks.