He brushed by me on the way back, nearly knocking me over. “I’m not dealing with this.” Laura was perched beside the canal, holding her knees, making herself as small as she could. She was smoking, speaking beneath her breath to herself. There was blood caked on her upper lip. She turned to me.
“Is there a lot of it?” she said.
“Laura,” I said. “You’re shaking.”
“Just like that night at that party where I fucked Dylan the first time, and you . . . when I turned over in bed . . .” She wiped the blood off her face with her palm. “I asked you if there was a lot of it.”
“I remember,” I said.
“I’m sorry I never really asked you about that night,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t save you. Without you . . .” She paused. “How many years have we been here? Time seems to go so fast now.”
“You couldn’t have saved me.”
“I could have,” she said. “Remember how dangerous I used to be?” She walked away from me and climbed over the small wall that separated the lot from the canal. She crouched and urinated into the water.
“You’ll never give up on me, right?” She took out a vial and put it to her nose. Her hands were shaking, and she dropped it. The glass and the cocaine fell on the rocks, indistinguishable from the grime of the canal. She leaned down.
“Please don’t do that,” I said. “Please, Laura.” She continued snorting whatever she could find, white or not white, manic for it all.
I walked away from her and wandered back into the party. I drank quickly so as to pass out quicker. The party was full of strangers. They were all mockeries. The party was a stream of faces, fractured sentences on labels, tours, galleries, film festivals, acquisitions, engagements, Dylan navigating through it, his face masked with coke, booze, that demonic New York confidence. He was on the couch smoking with a beautiful girl, another one whose name I’d never know, never remember. I fought the urge to throw something at her, innocent as she was. Her dark and flowering hair, her husky, flowering voice.
Laura began to speak of Jesus suddenly. She spoke of angels. She said her angels had come to forgive her sins. Her skin sagged over her bones. She’d lost her breasts. Some mornings I’d find her in the kitchen, her lips blue. Some mornings her face became so white I thought she’d die right before me. Laura heard voices. She switched languages midsentence.
One morning, I found Laura still awake, pacing the length of the apartment, holding Ofelia in her cage, swinging it back and forth like a pendulum.
“Laura, what’s going on?” She kept pacing in a daze, as if I were not there at all. “Laura!” I shouted. Finally I ran toward her. She dropped the cage like she’d seen a ghost. The bird clattered about between the bars, terrified.
“What?” she said.
“I called your name three times. You were in a trance.”
“Would you leave me alone? You’re the cursed one here. All those guys you fucked, dead. Then we get here and what happens?” She kicked the cage again. “Do you hear me? I want you to leave me the fuck alone.”
Dylan left us soon after the night Laura broke his chandelier in the canal. She tiptoed out from the lot with no shoes on, dancing around her own spill of glass. Neither of us ran after her. All else could be tolerated or ignored by Dylan, the voices, the agony, the madness, the drug abuse, but not the destruction of his work. He pulled out a bottle of whiskey. “That’s fifty thousand dollars she just destroyed,” he said. “The bitch is out. The bitch better not ever come back. And after all I did for her.”
Dylan and I began to drink. We finished the bottle and then walked to a bar. One of the new bars in the neighborhood. There was a line outside.
“Where the fuck did all these people come from?” he said. “This shit is all bridge and tunnel now. Fuck this fucking city. We’re going to members only.”
At the bar, Dylan took his hand and placed it in mine. I shifted and let his hand fall. “We’re losing her,” I said.
I wanted him to touch me again. I felt nauseous for wanting it. The sax and the piano and a DJ were going all at once. We were screaming at each other. He went to the other side of the bar. The room was full of people. Crimson lit. Joyous people. No one needed our names.
I began to dance. I hadn’t danced in years. Dylan had never seen me dance. Dylan watched me. His eyes haunted me. They were eyes that you saw later. Eyes that made you feel like you were on camera. Eyes of ambition. He was addictive. He was insolent. He was searing. Laura was right. Dylan was New York.
I was falling in the streets home. My scarf dragged, tripping me. Dylan was holding my wrist hard and fast, pulling me on. Where the canal was, I saw a dark forest. Where the coyotes once were, I saw Cerberus.
When we returned home, Laura was waiting for us. She was lying on the floor in the same position I’d found her in a year or so previous, splayed out on the floor beneath Dylan’s chandelier, looking at the ceiling as if at stars.
“Hello,” she said calmly.
Dylan took a glass that was on the counter and smashed it in his hand. “You bitch,” he screamed. His palm began to bleed.
“I’ll make it up to you,” she said.
“How will you make it up to me? I want you out of here.”
“Come here, Ariel. Come get naked and lie beside me,” she said.
“I’m tired, Laura,” I said.
“Come help me get my boyfriend back,” she said. “The two of us can make it up to you Dylan. We can give you a five-thousand-dollar experience. After all, my best friend is the world’s greatest blow job girl.”
“Leave me alone,” I said.
“Please,” she said. “Please, please, please. You know you want to. You’ve always wanted this. I know. I can see inside your dreams.”
In the morning, Dylan was gone. My skirt was hitched above my belly. My underwear was on the floor. Nothing ripped. The glass had been swept up. The blood from his hand was dried on my breast. There was nothing left of the night for me to stuff into a bag. On my inner thigh, there was a wound. His parting mark, a burn from a cigarette. It was blue and purple and more hideous than any of the three I had done on my own arm all those years ago.
Laura was in the bed watching me as I woke, staring hard and dark with a love or a hate so ferocious I yearned to flee her gaze, that ancient, unavoidable gaze. Laura pushed the blanket down to reveal her naked body, lifting her leg to show me her wound. “Blood sisters,” she said.
I take off for the doors, leaving my mother with the doctors and the nurses and the guards. I run toward the reservation. I trip over a dead saguaro and for a minute think it a body. In death, the saguaro’s needles abandon it. Its carcass resembles a skeleton. Walking upon one in the desert, it is always at first the mirage of a body left to rot beneath the sun. I remember thinking it would make for such a pretty structure for a chandelier, the saguaro’s corpse, but of course it would burn. In death, its water abandons it. It cannot hold the rain.
I don’t see my father but hear what I believe is a coyote, a raccoon, rustling just ahead. His low mutter in Arabic reveals him. He is walking rapidly, ducking behind saguaros, his hospital gown coming undone, a sheet of white fluttering in the bare brownness of everything. I scream his name. “Dad, Dad, Dad.”
“My ship is waiting,” he says. “There’s no time left.”
“You are walking in the middle of the fucking desert!” I say. “There is no ship.”
The morning Dylan left, the room billowing white, I looked out and saw that it was snowing. He was gone. No wallet, no forgotten sock. A note on the wall that read, You have until October. Off to Berlin, D. Like he appeared to us with the Lights, he disappeared, without trace or origin. He was the type of man who reinvents his life once every few years, who rids himself entirely and unapologetically of unwinning elements so that he could go on toward his nebulous goal, amass
more broken instruments, more parties, more strangers, more collectors, more buried, broken Lauras. This too was his power. He could disappear from the lives of others at any instant without consequence.
I went out in the snow. I held some in my hand. “I’m so sorry,” I said beneath my breath over and over again to no one. To myself. It was so pure, the snow, the purest of all powders, I thought, so pure it must be from elsewhere, from another planet.
Laura walked up behind me as if my sorries conjured her to me. “He’s gone,” she whispered as if there were someone else who might hear her. Someone else who cared. I left her there and went inside.
“Do you hate me?” she screamed.
I have always had recurring dreams about the apocalypse by water. But in one, it is the sun that has fallen and engulfed the sky. “But we are so far from this,” I say to the faceless many around me. “The sun won’t even begin to die for millions of years.”
“It is flaring,” they say, “before its time.”
“We were wrong,” they say. “We miscalculated. It is turning into a red giant. Soon it will be a supernova. We are nearing the end.”
Flakes of the star fall like snow in July. Flakes of the sun fall like fireflies. People are opening their mouths and gulping down the sunflakes like rain. “Tastes like rye,” one says.
“No, tastes likes blow,” another says.
I swallow a flake. “It tastes like God,” I say.
My father had called while I was out in the snow. How he had always sensed when I had fallen into trouble, I never knew. As when he demanded we go to the mountains just to see snow the day after the night with the blue-streaked blond. How he knew just what to say, what prayer to read, how to quiet my fears. We both suffered the same nightmares. We both woke up on the same nights with charley horses rattling our calves. We both knew no bounds to our escapism.
“How are you, my daughter?” he asked.
“The snow just stopped,” I said.
“Ahlam, one day you look in the mirror and you see your parents’ sadness in your eyes. In New York I liked to watch the snow. It is not fair, how quiet it is, the snow, it is not fair. It is not fair the snow does not fall in the desert. It would make so much sense.” I heard the cat’s whine, the door slam, the car engine, the garage. “My birthday is coming.”
“I want to come home,” I said.
The day before I left, Laura and I finally turned the space heaters off. Since Dylan had left, we ate in silence. I went to work, and when I returned, she was still in the tent in the truck, often drunk or asleep. We were an even older, an even more weary couple. Neither of us uttered his name.
For the first time in months, the sun reflected off the canal, beamed into the loft, and woke us up with it. It was suddenly spring. Laura came inside from the truck and demanded we go to the beach. “It’s still too cold,” I said. She began jumping up and down on the bed. She was even thinner than before, her cheekbones popped out from her skin. I hadn’t looked at her in so long. I had become afraid of looking at her at all. I could not accept that I was watching her die.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
In her purse, she carried a 750-ml bottle of Yellowtail, a medicine bottle of Oxys she pilfered off a dentist, and tucked between the cash in her wallet, a bag of blow. We took the A train out to its last stop, as we’d done in the beginning and hadn’t in years. The beach was still closed. No lifeguards, no police. There were no children. We stayed throughout the day. We drank the wine. We spoke of TP-ing houses at fourteen. We spoke of home. The wind off the water was cold. A fog rolled in. I napped intermittently.
“Take a bump?” she asked, smiling at me. I took a bump from her fist. My brain came alight with tenderness for her. I felt so sorry for everything. I yearned to embrace her, kiss her even, to stay with her, always her, my sister, my friend to the end. It was a story after all, even if a sick one. It was completely ours. She stood up and stripped. “Come in with me,” she said.
I shook her off.
“Come in with me,” she said again, yanking my arm.
“It’s going to freeze us,” I said.
Laura stuck out her tongue. Somehow, despite everything, she was still a child. Her face implored me, confused, excitable. She was still the girl running through the desert but on a more polluted course.
“Do you love me?” she asked. And then she dove into the waves. The dusk was complete above us.
I watched her and began to laugh nervously as she swam farther and farther out, the fog half disappearing her. “Aren’t you freezing?” I shouted. Suddenly her body wasn’t visible, and all I could see was her head ducking in and out of the waves. “Laura!” I screamed.
I entered the ocean, the tide pushing hard against me. My limbs went numb. The cold shot through my blood and my bones. The voices pounded in my temples. Come come come come come. They screamed louder and then whispered. I was sinking. Arms came up from the waves. There were bodies beneath me. I had stepped on them, on their chests and their bellies in an effort to enter the water. I knew their faces. Trevor, the blond streaked blue, Eli. And then more, too many, thousands. The water was all limbs. In the mist, the sky fell into the sea. I was burning inside. I shut my eyes. My chest was on fire. The pain would not last. The pain would not last.
I fought my way back to the beach and screamed for help. My knee began to ache like it hadn’t ever. There was nobody, nothing. Suddenly I saw Laura’s body rise up. She was standing, her waist above the water. I was hallucinating. She was surely dead.
“A sandbar!” she said, shivering when she came up from the water.
“Laura, you’re so cold you’re blue.”
She wrapped herself in the blanket we had lain on and lit a cigarette. Mascara ran down her face. The constellation on her chest was purple in the cold. I began to cry. She began to hum. “What the fuck are you singing?” I asked.
“You know the song, Sleeping Beauty.” Laura scooped up the sand and let it fall through her fingers, surveying the grains as if comprised of distinct, tiny worlds.
“Stop it,” I said. “This isn’t funny.”
She crooned on until her cigarette was gone. The ash in the wind blew around us like hesitant snow. “I want to set you free about something, Ariel. But you have to promise you’ll forgive me first.”
“Just don’t drown yourself again.”
“I’m a Jonah.”
The ocean had ripped the high from me. I felt nothing but panic, fear. I wanted nothing more than to deaden the static going and going in my mind. “What the fuck is a Jonah?”
“Someone who makes every ship sink wherever they go. Someone who brings bad weather. Someone who is cursed.” Laura was picking at her fingernails. “There is something else too. Eli, Señor Guapo, he had really nice-smelling sweat.”
I looked at her, perplexed.
“So it’s not a big deal you were fucking Dylan. I know it wasn’t just the once. Because I screwed Eli in his jeep. A day after you did. You told me it was only math homework, remember? And you thought you were cursed. But it’s been me all along.”
I left her on the beach, her humming reaching me faintly over the waves, the song she sang at the football game all those years ago beneath the fireworks, the one I couldn’t place, the one she always sang, far back as it was in my childhood, “Once Upon a Dream.” I wanted to walk faster, to run, far as possible from her, from my entire life, from the first day I ever saw her always just a few steps ahead.
I can hear them coming, their footsteps rushing toward us. I hear a dog bark, my mother screaming at the doctors, the officers calling my name. I take my father’s hand. “I’m coming with you.”
“It’s just there. Do you see it?” Tears run down his cheeks. His hands are cold with sweat.
“I see it,” I say. I walk him in a circle. I walk him back toward the fluor
escence, the windowless halls of disinfectant, the heart monitors, sheets and beds and sheets. He stops.
“It’s just there,” he says again. Something shimmers in the distance. A veil of water. A mirage.
In the morning Laura was by the window with Ofelia. She was smoking a cigarette, looking out as the trains passed. “I was just being crazy. I didn’t mean any of that. I was having a little schizo moment, you know. Eli, Guapo, whatever. That didn’t happen. But I did mean it about the Jonah thing . . .”
“Maybe the worst part is that it has nothing to do with us,” I said. I put my arm around her mildly. “Maybe I’m a Jonah too.”
“I’m with you,” she said. “You thought you were following me, but I was following you too. Always. Always.”
As I walked out of the door, she called after me. “Ariel . . . we live in a world of crippled hearts. But we shall still love. Remember the rain will always follow you. And to listen for the trumpet.”
I did not turn around. When I boarded the train, I saw the sight of our little home beside the canal, the canal carved through the abandon like a crucifix.
It was my father’s birthday. He wanted to have a picnic by the lake. It was the only body of water for miles. It was man-made and nestled between the mountains. The water was brownish and full of mud. There were no fish, and signs everywhere warned against swimming. But the sight of any blue against the desert rock brought relief.
My father already had trouble standing, and so my mother and I took either side of him as he limped toward the beach. He tossed his head up and down, soaking his hair. “You must touch your head to the water, Ahlam. You must submerge it every time. Remember this when you go to the ocean,” he said. “This is how you rid yourself of the evil eye. The salt gets in your hair to your shoulders.”
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