Sonora

by Hannah Lillith Assadi

  But the first official party did not happen until the New Year. Dylan hung a swing from the ceiling he had made of a plank of wood and rope, and set up pillows in the old windowless freight elevator that smelled of urine so people could ride up and down, drunk or high, like some sick circus ride. “Like passing through the rings of hell,” he said.

  Before anyone had even arrived, he had set out a bowl of cocaine in the center, surrounded by bottles of vodka, tequila, gin. Beside the coke was a stack of blades he used for cutting paper and two sheets of glass with a pressed lily between them. “¿Qué es?” Laura asked.

  “The white blossom,” he said.

  The fractured mirrors surrounded us, the bed, the swing, the table, as in some carnival funhouse, reflecting us back to ourselves, our fissure, what we were becoming. The lot grew full of people we did not know shattering beer bottles off the concrete walls as Dylan had urged them to do, howling at their capacity for destruction, expressing admiration at how good they could smash up their pain. Dylan had set up a station for lighting fireworks over the canal.

  It became a trend that after women took lines of cocaine, they would kiss each other provocatively for the camera. There was always someone taking pictures. I had never until that night tried the stuff.

  “Just do a line. You won’t die or anything, promise,” Laura said.

  Dylan was suddenly behind us, his arms around our bodies, his breath hot on my shoulder. He could be so becoming, even with vodka on his breath. He took a key from his pocket and scooped some powder onto it. He held it to Laura’s nostril, and then to mine.

  “Dance with me,” Laura said. Her hand was reaching for Dylan’s, but he shrugged her off. He took the camera away from the photographer.

  “Come here, then,” she said to me. “Sit on my lap.” Laura pulled me onto the swing. “Here,” she said. “You’ve got glitter on your lips.”

  Her lips were soft, her tongue softer than any boy’s. It curled around mine, probing. I hadn’t been kissed since Eli. Her hands went to my neck. My bones shuddered. I was her marionette. I was her dancer; she was my music. Her hair brushed my shoulder. We paused, and our lips joined again. Her breath tasted of wine. I felt the cocaine burn in my throat.

  She drew away. When I looked up, Dylan was watching us, the camera at his side. Laura bounced off the swing. She had won him for the night.

  In the morning, we heard that thousands of birds had fallen from the sky in cities all over the world. Fish had washed up on shores across the country, their blood staining the beaches on that first day of the year. I had believed if I touched no one, no one would die. If I skipped the cracks, if I saw nothing, if we were out of the desert, we had escaped hell—but it wasn’t true. Everything was just dying faster in the world.

  The nurse sweeps into the room. She ignores my mother and me. My mother’s legs are crossed; her hands are on her temples. I know she is getting a migraine. “You have a fever,” the nurse says to my father. “I’ll get the doctor.”

  “I’m happy with a fever; a fever I can handle. As long as I can walk without pain,” he says.

  “What does that mean?” my mother shrieks. “Why would he have a fever?”

  “Mom, calm down,” I say.

  “Calm down, Rachel,” my father says.

  “It’s relatively common. A bad reaction to the anesthesia,” the nurse says and leaves us.

  “When can I go home?” my father calls after her. He sits up in the bed. My mother leans over him to wrestle him down. “You can’t make me stay here!” he screams.

  The snow turned the nights violet. On the subway, I knew warmth from huddling against strangers in the crowded train. On the coldest nights, Laura and Dylan slept inside. We had one industrial heater that worked intermittently. I could smell Dylan, though Laura lay between us. And for knowing it was his smell, for taking note of it at all, I felt guilty. When we were all together, he never tried to touch me, and though I had seen him naked a dozen times by then, he slept in the bed inside with his jeans and boots on. Some nights he never came home at all, and it was just Laura and me. If I tried to speak of where he might be, she changed the subject or left me alone to smoke a cigarette by the canal. There were subjects we suddenly no longer touched like an old married couple making do.

  One night, there were sirens and a crowd of people staring into the canal. The bridge was covered in ice. The snow heaved into us with the wind, sputtering out over the canal like confetti. In the water below, we saw a dolphin, perking its head in and out of the water, its face and skin covered in the black liquid poison that filled the canal.

  “He’s crying,” Laura said.

  “He must have gotten lost coming in from the ocean,” said one of the bystanders. “They’re going to let him die here.”

  “Can’t someone get in and save him?” Laura said.

  “No one is going in there,” the woman said.

  “No one is going to save him?” Laura screamed.

  That night, we were alone, and I awoke to Laura’s naked back, the sprawl of freckles on her browned skin reminding me in the confused half-light of waking next to the one back I’d loved before. I covered her up. How she did not wake from the cold, I still do not know. She always spoke in her sleep, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English, sometimes in a language I did not recognize. She was always thin, and thinner that winter. Her ribs were like an accordion beneath her skin. Her legs shook in her sleep.

  I couldn’t sleep and walked to the kitchen. I looked at the clock. It was only still evening in Arizona. I dialed my father for the first time. In the past months, I had only spoken to my mother.

  He did not say hello, only, “Are you ready to come home?”

  “I am trying to dance,” I said.

  “No, you want to ruin your life,” he said. “And die there while you’re at it.”

  “Dad, please.”

  “‘Please’ is not going to help you. I had a dream last night that you’ve been given the evil eye.”

  “I just wanted to say—” I began.

  “Come home,” he interrupted me, then hung up.

  I smoked a cigarette by the window and watched the trains crisscross, stall, and then slowly dip underground again. I walked back to the bed. On the nightstand was a leather-bound journal. I whispered, “Laura” to see if she was awake. She snored once and turned over. I opened the book.

  There was sheet music pasted in, drawings of Dylan, a photo of the two of us young on the steps of my old apartment building, looking ironic or bored, the desert behind us. There was a letter penned in nice script, in Spanish, signed Maria. The letter was old and yellowing. Below in Laura’s own hand, I read, the curse must be broken. And below that, a Jonah of the desert. The rest of the pages were blank except for a single photo in the back.

  I noticed Laura staring at me and flipped the book closed.

  Dylan walked in at that moment and destroyed whatever angry exchange there might have been.

  “I was stuck in a train for three hours,” he said. “People were going mad, trying to climb out the windows into the tunnel. They didn’t tell us anything, just kept us like that. For three fucking hours.” He walked toward the bed and lifted the covers off us. “Did you hear me?”

  “Sí, jefe,” Laura said. I pretended to be asleep.

  “Get me a beer,” he said and slapped her leg. “And you . . . sleep outside with Laura. I want to be alone in my own home.”

  In the tent, I woke up sick with a fever. It was pure fever without vision or chorus of voices. I slept the entire day. I remembered none of it except for one dream of my mother. I saw my mother’s face as an adult’s, her body that of a child. I spoke to her, but she would not acknowledge me. She sat before a wall of indigo glass vases and, just beyond it, the Galilee.

  Outside the window where the vases were shelved, the olive
trees wrapped tortuously about everything. There were gardens of azalea, white roses, walls laced with bougainvillea. We walked through the garden, my mother and I, without saying a word. The fountain was covered over with moss. Everything reeked of disintegration. We arrived at the lake, at the Sea of Galilee. We stood there and watched as its surface changed, turned into the canal just beside Dylan’s, full of abandon, full of rot. The late afternoon turned to night. We looked up and over the lake, stars fell. My mother looked at me. She was trying to tell me something, but her mouth would not open.

  When the fever broke, Laura was sitting beside me, smoking. The sunlight through the flap of the tent was so cold it was blue. The sheets were wet beneath me. She had covered me in her mother’s coyote fur. “I sang for you.”

  “How can you love him?” I said.

  “You know how,” she said.

  Dylan had not sold a piece of art the entire time we lived there, so when he finally did, for a healthy five figures, he told us, there was another party. It was bigger than the last. There were a DJ and burlesque dancers, the elevator was outfitted in disco lights, and there was a small canoe in the canal so guests could row out over the waste. Hundreds of people came in eclectic costumes. Dylan walked among his guests like a king. Everyone knew his name. The old producer smashed Dom Pérignon bottles against the wall and then sat on the swing with a girl who had her hair in pigtails. Laura shouted at him that the swing would break, and he looked at her as if he’d never known her at all.

  There was a dancer climbing a piece of fabric suspended from the ceiling. She flew. We drank absinthe, we drank champagne. I was dizzy. I was swaying. The din was deafening. Suddenly Laura was nowhere, and Dylan was behind me, his hand at my hip. “Come here. Come with me,” he whispered. I followed him to the bathroom.

  He had a vial in one hand. He poured it out on the toilet seat. “You look a little overwhelmed,” he said. “Maybe this will help.”

  “I’m good,” I said.

  He took two lines off the porcelain and poured the powder on the indent between his thumb and forefinger. He pushed my face, softly, down into his hand. I sniffed. He spit into his fingers and pushed through my jeans into my underwear. “I don’t want you to feel good. I want you to swim in fucking starlight.”

  I slammed the bathroom door. Laura was in the kitchen taking shots. No one had seen. Nothing had happened.

  And then I wasn’t swaying. And then I was dancing inside the crowd. And then I was in love with every man and woman whose sweat touched mine. I was lying down, my head in the lap of a beautiful stranger, who caressed my hair, my arms, his eyes bright, concerned. “Who are you?”

  “I’m a dancer,” I said.

  “That’s pretty, a dancer,” he said. “Pretty, pretty dancer dancing in the desert. Pretty warrior dancer. But who is going to save Sonora?”

  Laura shook me. I had fallen asleep outside on the bench beside the fire.

  “Where’d he go?” I cried.

  “Where’d who go?” she said. “Who were you dreaming of, Sleeping Beauty?”

  The sun was up. The last embers were dying in the firepit. There were only a few of us left. Some were drinking beside the canal, unable to let the party end. Wishing it to go on. Cursing the last guest for leaving. And then, from hundreds, there were only just we three, as if there was never a party at all.

  Where we lived, there were no bars, no restaurants, no flea markets. Only the bodega and the train station, the men and their watermelon stand at their own parties in the members only club raging on, undisturbed. We liked to say we were in the middle of the desert, the end of the world.

  I’d walk in the middle of the street to remain visible to the little traffic there was. Every night, I’d pass the woman who sat on the drawbridge over the canal. She would pull down her pants in front of the few passersby and police. In the afternoons she would punch the air and in the early mornings would scream at someone certainly still locked up with her inside her mind. “You come from a sick house, a sick family.”

  During her monologues she would lapse into a maniacal clapping, her accent sometimes British and of another era, sometimes of the American street. “You destroyed my life!” she bellowed over the canal. Sometimes she would relieve herself in the polluted marsh at its banks. When she was finished, she’d speak of her actions in the third person. “Can you believe that bitch just took a shit?”

  She always wore the same thing: black leggings and a sweatshirt wrapped around her head like a turban. I never knew where she showered or slept. She never asked for anything. I never asked her name. I thought sometimes she was a creature born of that polluted waterway, the Gowanus, stinking worse than feces in the unbearable summers, a conglomerate character of its strange beauty by moonlight and boastful wreckage by daylight.

  One particularly freezing night, three police officers surrounded her and told me to walk on the other side of the street. I heard her call to me for the first time. “Tell them you are seeing this. Help me.”

  This, we were told, was part of the city cleaning up.

  My mother yells at the nurse, “Why is the doctor taking so long?” and then collapses into a fit of coughing. The sound hurts even me. I take my father’s hand. He escapes the grasp of the nurse and shoves me off. He tries to stand but is too weak.

  “We’re going to have to restrain him,” the nurse says. “He has to calm down.”

  My father falls silent. He lies back down. And this is almost worse. I cannot look into his eyes. They are lopsided, mahogany. I cannot look at him in this bed. I stare out the window, stare out into the desert. My eyes glaze over. I wish for the doctor, for a scream, a siren, to break the silence. Break what we feel, being in this room, relying on machines to measure the life coursing in us, measuring the beats we have left.

  “Did you dream, Daddy?” I ask. He looks at me fearfully. “While you were out?”

  “Ocean,” he says. “And I wanted to swim. So I did. But the waves were strong. At the top of the beach, there were houses. But between the sand and the houses, there was a drop. A cliff. There were people living in the cliff with candles, praying. And there were people at the bottom of the cliff. People who didn’t survive being thrown back from the ocean. I thought that was where I was going. The ocean was throwing me back so hard I’d miss the beach and fall into that cliff.”

  My father begins to cry. The salt is in my throat, my mouth.

  “Which ocean was it?” I ask.

  “Home,” he says.

  That winter, Laura and I took the train to the Atlantic Ocean. We stood on the boardwalk, pieces of snow in our hair. The ocean was darker than I imagined, far darker than the clear sea in Mexico. It was so loud. Planes flew overhead. The waves tumbled violently. The beach was empty except for three Orthodox Jews, all in black, walking beneath large umbrellas. “Looks like a funeral,” Laura said.

  “Is it any better here?” I said.

  “Where do you think that plane is going? Maybe we should go there.”

  “Paris,” I said.

  “Oui, oui,” she said in an exaggerated French accent. “Mademoiselle, venez ici, vous êtes très jolie.”

  “I’m cold,” I said.

  “Even the fucking sun is cold here.” She pulled at her hair, stretching, squinting toward the horizon, though it was overcast. “The thing about New York is that it’s unavoidable. Maybe that is the only way to be, the sort of person no one can consider forgetting. Like Dylan. You have to be hated and loved by everyone at the same time to accomplish that.”

  “So I should just go on as blow job girl forever.”

  “Yes,” she said. Her face lightened. “That’s a great idea.”

  The men with their black umbrellas turned uphill on the sand from the water. They walked in single file, the eldest leading the younger men behind him. They all had cigarettes. As they passed Lau
ra and me, they averted their gaze. Laura called, “Hello.” The youngest nodded. They walked down the beach and then paused. They wrapped their arms in Tefillin, then took a few steps forward and back and began to rock. The ocean muffled their words.

  “Looks like they are praying to the ocean,” Laura said.

  “This city needs a prayer,” I said. “But they’re looking at Jerusalem.”

  “We need a fucking prayer.”

  At Dylan’s, some days I woke up to white noise blaring from the television though the house was empty.

  In the shower, I heard someone at the piano. A short melody that drifted or a single note banged on as a child will play, delighted at the violent sounds they can make, not worried for the instrument, not knowing it to be one of the few things left reserved only for beauty. Then the sheath slammed shut. The instruments were all half desired, half forgotten. It was as if they were left behind by a ghost right in the middle of playing.

  Sometimes in the corner of my eye, I saw a girl running through the loft. A see-through girl, a silhouette. She looked the way the world looks without my glasses. Vaguely hued, indistinct. She looked the way a body looks underwater, lost in the blur of bubble and wave.

  I sat beside the window and imagined the view of the Gowanus Canal was the canal in Arizona beside which my father and I used to walk. A desert canal snaking through the city. I imagined it blue and full of swimmers. I imagined it sunlit. I imagined saguaro in place of signs, paloverde instead of cars. I saw the buildings melt to mountains. Like hunting for a dead beloved’s face among the living, in places, we find the place we loved before. Now here was New York, torn through by dust.

  I understood why someone would look at the ocean only to be in the direction of Jerusalem. I understood Bedouins who created odes to lovers lost in abandoned camps, lovers who would never be seen again. I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger. Sometimes the sound of someone playing a Bach Partita on their violin wafted out into the winter streets, and I closed my eyes and imagined I was walking through a storm in the desert. Sometimes at work I heard my voice change, I heard Laura in the way I talked, a certain phrase, a certain grammatical error, her favorite conjunction that never existed, and-or-else, and-or-else we’ll just live by the sea, felt her in the way that I moved, how over the years I came to light my cigarettes just like her, between ring and middle fingers, how I laughed or how my cash was always stuffed and disorganized in my wallet, just like hers was. I had brought her into my skin. I dreamed sometimes that in the mirror was her face reflected back at me. Still, I don’t know where she ended and I began.