Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  As Cassidy follows the curve of the road out to the desert, the valley fades into the long, brown flats of Riverside, adorned by a sarcastic smattering of palm trees. Out past the highway, terra-cotta-shingled houses huddle around twisting inner streets and culs-de-sac. The development is mostly abandoned: the houses stand empty, rooms with no furniture but what was left behind, carpets marked by depressions where the legs of a love seat once stood. The air is still and hot; the appliances are unplugged or missing. In the backyard of a sand-colored ranch, pale concrete surrounds an empty swimming pool, punctured by short, tough plants with tiny blue flowers growing through cracks in the surface. At the base of the pool sits a thin layer of water scattered with leaf matter and plastic wrappers—rainfall, or the remnant of days when the cavity was filled with brilliant blue WAT-R, dancing in the bright. As the sun bears down hot overhead, a black bird lands on the aqua-colored surface, totters to the edge of the puddle, and drinks. A second bird joins, and a third. And then, at some unseen signal, they take flight together and are gone.

  A quick phone call proves that Hailey, a former set assistant with an overgrown hairstyle and bubble-gum voice, is no help at all. Not only does she not know June’s address, location, current phone number, or place of work, but she keeps asking why Cassidy is trying to track her down, and whether June knows that her sister is looking for her. “I think she just really wanted to get off grid, you know?” The voice is sugar-sweet and reminds her of the older girls from middle school, the ones who graduated but came back around every Friday to hang out in the parking lot and show off their long teenage legs. “Not just a couple of solar panels on the roof—actually living out where you can’t get the news on your phone or find your own driveway without a map. Someplace where even the Bed Bath and Beyond coupons can’t find you. Being hard to find was part of the whole desert dream for Junie.” The woman calls her “Junie,” as if she knows a single real thing about Cassidy’s sister.

  It didn’t matter how long Cassidy and June had been out of touch, how long it had been since June had gently brushed the stray hairs out of the luminous frame of Cassidy’s contoured, camera-ready face, or since Cassidy had last felt June’s feathery touch cool and smooth on the hot nape of her neck as she barfed into a nightclub toilet. It didn’t matter whether Cassidy knew June’s current job title or marital status or whether she was still doing the weird monofood diet, with the watermelon in the morning, cucumbers for lunch, and for dinner raw tuna seasoned with just a little bit of lemon and salt, as she had been doing just before they lost touch. Growing up with someone meant you knew them forever, whether they wanted you to or not, and with indelible, bone-aching depth. Trying to rid yourself of someone you had grown up with, someone who had seen you turn from child to unchild, was like trying to pull your own memories out through your eyeballs.

  Sometimes she remembers June in the months before Kassi Keene was canceled, the last months they were together, working on set each day from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon and then again from six or seven or eight on into the late hours of the night. Cassidy had gotten June hired on as her personal hairstylist for the show’s past two seasons, a good way of guaranteeing that she’d always have somebody to go out with on a free night—and an emergency gofer who already knew her preferred brands of yogurt and tequila. It also ensured that June’s bank account would always receive a reliable, though modest, influx of cash, since on her own her sister tended to self-select boring, ill-paid jobs, like “barista,” and refused all attempts to slip her helpful checks. Maybe it was insulting to have your little sister offer you a month and a half’s rent when you told her your car needed an oil change, but in Cassidy’s book this was just generosity, generosity and evidence that, however screwed up the tabloids might say she was, she still understood basic familial love.

  Her sister made a good hairstylist—even the head of hair and makeup said so—though she was far slower than the others, and Cassidy’s hair always took twice as long in the seat. With a serious, almost fretful expression on her face, June would stand in front, blocking Cassidy’s view of herself in the makeup mirror. Slowly, meditatively, she would reach for the jar of texture clay, unscrew the smooth lid, and coat her fingertips in a thin layer of the stuff, which smelled of roses and fresh chalk. Then she would rest her ass on the surface of the vanity and bend her shoulders toward Cassidy in the chair, her brows furrowed and close. With an expression of unparalleled intentness, June reached out for one lock of Cassidy’s hair at a time, rubbing it gently between forefinger and thumb, twisting it slightly so that each tendril bent toward an organically bouncy, sun-kissed shape. One by one, June would touch her long, intelligent fingers to every piece of Cassidy’s hair, rapt and absorbed, barely speaking, and never looking in her sister’s eyes. In these silent stretches, Cassidy was free to drink her in: to feel June’s short, shallow breath light against her face as her sister hovered close in concentration, to breathe in the warm, clean floral of her sunscreen. To watch this face she knew so well revealing itself to her with its new adult fullness, its new adult roughness, coming as close to her eyes as it had when she was a child and they lay together under a lime-green bedsheet, telling stories with the flashlight on.

  From the seat to her right, Patrick releases a low moan of fear. Cassidy follows his line of sight, out the window to the sage-studded fields and the rows of strange white windmills, their heavy blades turning against the background of a boulder-ridden mountainside. His mouth hangs open, and dry breath wheezes through the gap between his teeth. He comes in and out of lucidity, in and out of consciousness, with more time spent unconscious than not. He’s had trouble swallowing recently, and his tongue has turned a pale, dusty pink, like the color of an old, hardened pencil-eraser. “It’s all right, Hamlin,” Cassidy says in a soothing tone. “You don’t like the windmills. A lot of people don’t. They think they’re eyesores. I know they look close, but they’re far away. It would take an hour for you to walk to the nearest one, maybe more. They’ll never hurt you.” She picks up the water bottle from out of the cupholder and pops open the sport top. Genuine water, 100 percent, sloshes inside its plastic embrace, the substance fast and clear and glinting in the sun-filled cabin. Keeping one hand steady on the wheel, she leans toward Patrick and aims the nozzle at his lips, tilting and squeezing so that the mouth-warm liquid splashes into and around his open maw. She dabs his chin with a fast-food napkin, and then turns back to the road.

  * * *

  —

  Patrick gazes in amazement at a diner, or what looks like a diner, with long rows of high-backed chairs upholstered in slippery beige and orange. The fabric is waterproof: he ponders whether that means he’s supposed to pour a drink onto it. There are lots of things on top of the table: a squeeze jar of red, a squeeze jar of yellow, little plastic-sealed packets in a shallow white dish. There are two tall plastic glasses of frosty-cold cola, and in his hand a tight little unit of fork, knife, spoon mummied up together in a paper napkin. Patrick thinks of the different ends, different edges of those three utensils pushed up against one another, scratching and rubbing against one another in the snug package, the three things so different they shouldn’t even be together—he knows he should probably let them out. Spooning with a knife, he thinks to himself, then immediately forgets what he’s thinking. He reaches for the cola, but a thin, pink-nailed hand slaps at his fingers.

  “Don’t touch that,” Cassidy says. “It’s the bad stuff, I checked with the hostess. Big Soda is using WAT-R now, it’s in the ingredient list.”

  “I have to,” he gripes, reaching for it anyway. “I’m so thirsty.” His voice feels like a bit of chewed nut stuck in a crevice of his throat, a particle he can’t cough out. She watches him plunge his muzzle into the clutter of ice floating at the top, like a Labrador. Cold liquid swirls around his hot, tight lips, erasing the deep-grooved taste of pennies and plastic and sweaty automobile inter
ior. The cubes bump against his teeth as he drinks, and he sticks his tongue out so that the liquid may slide down faster and more. The sweetness of the beverage, its energetic fizz, slakes something deeper than thirst within him. He looks up and sighs with deep satisfaction: he feels like a man again, a man once more. He could drink another right this second. On the Revelators message board, people whispered that WAT-R had added salts to make you thirsty for your next one, a medicine that stoked the sickness.

  Cassidy squints at him from beneath the brim of her black hat, vaguely repulsed.

  “Hamlin,” she says, “you have to be smart about this. You’re already sick. You’re not as sick as you could be. You can’t keep drinking this stuff, or you’re going to end up a vegetable, like those people in the clinic. You’ll never get back home.”

  “You’re right,” he says sadly, disappointed in himself. “I don’t know why I did it. I guess I just wanted to feel like a regular guy again, drinking a soda, and not an irregular guy. Not a vegetable.” He rubs his eyes violently, a squinching sound coming from beneath his fist.

  “Listen, don’t beat yourself up.” Cassidy pats his elbow. “I’m just telling you as a friend, I’m not trying to make you feel bad. We want you to make it all the way out of this, all the way back home, to where you belong.”

  Cassidy is being so nice to him, Patrick thinks. A sparkly feeling in the space between his lungs.

  “Wear these,” she says, handing him a pair of aviators from the gas station next door. “Just trust me. Your eyes have a weird look to them.”

  With the sunglasses on, the room becomes dim. Through the dimness, she smiles crookedly at him, and he feels good.

  When the waitress comes back to take their food order, she stops, bends slightly, looks under the brim of the wide dark hat, covers her mouth for a moment, then leans forward with an almost apologetic look on her face: “I’m so sorry, but is there any chance that you’re Cassidy Carter?”

  “There’s a chance,” says Cassidy.

  “I wouldn’t have seen you if it weren’t for the hat,” the waitress says. “Only celebs wear hats like that.”

  “He’ll have a grilled cheese with fries,” she responds coolly. “I’ll take the spinach-and-goat-cheese omelet. Toast, not potatoes.”

  “I heard on some TV show that you’re not a very friendly person,” says the waitress.

  “I don’t know if I want grilled cheese,” Patrick says.

  “I’m never sure how long you’re going to be with me in the waking world, cowboy,” Cassidy says to Patrick, ignoring the woman completely. “So we’re getting something that packs up easy, just in case you check out in the middle of the meal.”

  As the waitress walks away, her thumbs tapping on the screen of her smartphone, Patrick looks out the window at the parking lot and beyond. Surrounding the familiar shapes of curb, sidewalk, and gutter are thousands upon thousands of small silver-green bushes, their shape rough and guarded. The spiky clusters repeat themselves again and again and into infinity, each tangle of vegetation distinct, an unneighborly distance from those around it. The pattern iterates like wallpaper until it reaches the horizon line, where it becomes too small to decipher. In its vastness and flatness, it reminds him of a sea, the underwater part of the sea, laid bare and drained of all its liquid. Enormous silver-sided fish navigate the pebbled surface, drifting above the sand. They cast a hovering shadow as they sift for morsels of food, sucking the stones into their large, open mouths and spitting them back out. From certain angles, it’s possible to see through the gaping orifice to a sliver of blue, visible in gaps when the gill opens and shuts. As their bodies turn slowly in the sky, listing like oversized helium balloons, he sees the glint of bright desert sunlight against airfish scales and thinks it looks just like the sparkle you find on top of the sea. The glare hurts his tender brain, his mortal face. A throbbing blindness.

  “What are they?” he asks slowly, wonder audible in his voice.

  “Which part?” she replies, turning to look at him, turning to peer into his eyes through the dark-tinted lenses. “The sage bushes?”

  * * *

  —

  In the back of the van, the boxes lie crushed or dented and the bottles of vintage water from Cassidy’s last payment have come loose. They roam free, plastic colliding with glass and the different kinds of water all mingling—crinkly plastic bottles from hotel conferences and sleek flasks of electrolyte-enriched thinking-water, cans of raspberry seltzer and long blue bottles filled from artesian springs: they skitter across the cargo bed from left to right when Cassidy shifts into the right lane, and from right to left when she does the opposite. Either way, they confront Patrick’s supine body, curled protectively around himself in the holding area, his legs an obstacle for rolling bottles to negotiate, the vacant space at the center of his fetal position a place where the containers collect and huddle together, faintly clinking.

  “Are we where we’re supposed to be?” Patrick asks, sitting up suddenly in the cargo area and peering out the two small portholes in the back door. The huddled bottles slide toward the rear door. He sees the highway slipping away behind them, the distance fleeing and yet remaining oddly inert, ever escaping and ever the same.

  She turns and looks back at him from the driver’s seat. The black hat sits in the empty space next to her. Her face is hot, flushed, with little strands of damp blond hair flattened around her hairline.

  “I had to make a decision at the highway fork,” she explains. The air conditioning wheezes warm air, inexplicably damp. “When my sister moved out here, did she choose leftward, toward Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms? Or did she veer right, toward Palm Springs and the Other Desert Cities? Up through Morongo Canyon, or south and east into the Sky Valley? I tried to think about what she might feel when she saw the two signs. She would have liked the sound of Morongo, like some lost land of swirling mists. But she would also have liked the sound of a Sky Valley, someplace serene where you could just lie flat on the ground and watch the colors above you change. In the end, I had to pick an exit. I went with the one to Joshua Tree. She always loved that album.”

  “Who’s your sister?” Patrick asks.

  She ignores him. “I’m going to ask around at the New Age food store out there. It seems crazy, but it’s a small town, and I have this feeling the acupuncturists or yogis around there might know. I remember she said she’d cut hair out here if she had to, but she wanted to get into something more serious, something that really helped people. Crystal healing and aura repair, stuff like that.”

  “There are people living around here too,” Patrick murmurs vaguely. “Out here in the desert, eating the cactus and drinking the air.”

  “Why do you say that?” Cassidy asks. All she’s seen for miles and miles is the diner, receding in her rearview mirror.

  “How else do you think he got out there?” Patrick says. He points out the front of the van at a tall man in a crisp gray suit standing on the right side of the highway, next to a spiny, many-armed cholla cactus. Under the hot afternoon sun, the tall, thin man looks blithely immaterial: no sweat, no wrinkles, no dust on his finely cut blazer.

  Cassidy looks out at the vast, unbroken terrain and then turns back to the road, fixing her eyes on the bright-yellow line that divides the traffic in two.

  “You should eat your sandwich,” she says grimly.

  * * *

  —

  Above the sagebrush expanse, the sky fills with clouds. Soft, cottony cirrus clouds, like the ones Alison described to him over the phone, the ones she imagines when she closes her eyes and thinks of girlhood. Tall, smeary clouds of a saucerlike form, with a shape like a thin oval of petal-white soap dissolving into its surroundings. The clouds are white, like the thinness of a curtain catching the sun. The clouds are soft, like the baby squirrel that fell from its nest and that you are not allowed to tou
ch, like the softness you think when you look at it and not the too-real feeling you have when you reach out with your clumsy, sticky hand. The clouds are quick, like milk spilling in slow motion, melting across the blue at a pace perceptible only if you stand out under the big sky ceiling, looking up and waiting, looking up until your neck aches.

  And then there are the clouds that don’t move. Hanging in the sky over Los Angeles, but coming your way. They grow larger, which means they’re coming closer, but their shape doesn’t change at all: the image simply expands. “Plastic,” derived from the Greek word plastikos, originally referred to the capacity to take form, which was also the capacity for one form to be destroyed in the path of another. Today the word means disposable forks and grocery-store clamshells, rollerball pens and freezer bags—but it was once explosive, reducing materials to their simpler shapes. Stiff and thickly wadded, heavy and faintly blue. A cloud that looks like nothing else at all, a cloud that looks exactly like a cloud, multiplied and reiterated across the horizon. Floating in the sky, as big as a castle and as heavy, they’re coming closer every minute. The softer, lighter, whiter clouds pass before them, blown by the wind. But these new ones: they just sit there, unmoving. Like the clouds painted on the ceiling of a casino mall, they appear more real from a distance. They remain still and quietly watching, waiting for their moment to approach, waiting for their moment to show what they really are.