* * *
—
Cassidy walks in the center of the road, dust in her sandals, gathered between her toes. To her right and left, small houses exist at the end of long dirt driveways. A driveway is just the absence of vegetation, a pathway exterminated through the fields of sage and creosote. To her side, a chain-link fence has been set into the beige-colored sand, surrounding a small yellowish home. One group of plants is separated from another. Across the thick, inflexible metal mesh, the plants respire silently, steadily, oblivious to the structures that divide them.
She has a good feeling about this neighborhood. The girl working behind the juice counter told her that not one but three holistic healers live on Sunburst Court, and one of them has a thick, dark, waist-length braid, a descriptor that has fit June at various times in the past. Walking down the long, curving street, with Patrick safely parked in the van behind her, she feels an energy surrounding her that she would call “familiar,” a feeling of arriving home that could only mean that June is nearby, since, other than her sister, Cassidy has no home anymore, just a couple acres of rubble north of Malibu and a borrowed rental van. Any of these homes looks as if it could belong to a holistic healer: there are windchimes and stained-glass mobiles hanging from the eaves, rows of quartz-crystal points and amethyst-encrusted geodes lined up along the windowsills. There are brightly striped Mexican blankets and Turkish kilims and lamps shaded by pieces of metal intricately punctured in branching, vinelike patterns. There is a figurine of a big-breasted earth mother, and one of Boba Fett. Any of these things are things that she could imagine her sister owning, and though that unnarrowed breadth might cause some people to grow pessimistic and lose hope, to Cassidy it feels instead as though her sister’s presence saturates the air, the way the scent of griddled batter fills every room of the tiny Yucca Heights apartment when your sister makes pancakes on a Sunday morning and your mother is god knows where.
One house calls to her more than the others: the outer walls have been painted a girlish lavender, the front door is decorated with a metal knocker in the shape of a honeybee. June always liked purple. June was once stung in the mouth by a honeybee, which had crawled into a can of cola in search of sweetness. Cassidy lifts the heavy honeybee shape and strikes it three times against the door, but nobody answers. She tries the doorknob, but it’s locked. She circles around the house, her hands pressed against the pastel walls, trying to peer in through the windows. She trudges through thickets of lemony sage, her eyes hungry for the clues that lie on the other side of the glass, the woolen wall hangings and macramé plant-hammocks that are manufactured en masse but still manage to look handmade. Her bare legs are crisscrossed by thin white scratches that are beginning to turn red. In the back of the van, Patrick wakes up and mistakes the cargo hold for a windowless, airless jail cell. He begins screaming, but his scream is so loud in the enclosed metal space that he shocks himself back into silence. A salty liquid slides down his forehead, down the sides of his nose, and into his mouth. Blood, or sweat? He barely knows the words, but something about the taste reminds him of heating up leftovers in the microwave, the indefinable, ghostly presence of some unflavored flavor in the food, something unfamiliar that wasn’t there the first time. Suddenly the back doors fly open and new air rushes in, making him gasp, making his lungs feel naked and cold.
“Are you okay?” Cassidy says, her eyes wide.
“Thirsty,” he says in a rasping voice, but corrects himself: there’s a more accurate word. “No. Hot. Hot.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and Patrick is surprised to see that she’s hugging him, apologizing, and enfolding his shoulders within her thin, sweaty arms. “I won’t do that to you again, I promise. I shouldn’t have left you in the car. Not even for five minutes. I should know better. I left a dog in the car once on a day like this, and he went kaput. He was a beautiful dog, a long-haired Chihuahua. His name was Tiny.”
* * *
—
The lockbox has five dials on it, each of which needs to be turned to the proper number in order to release the key. Cassidy stands before the back door and shouts at him to check the number in the front, the street address. “Five times out of nine,” she says, “they’ll use the address, even though it’s so obvious.” Patrick is too far away to hear. Where he stands, he can see a dark color in the sky, descending on the mountain line, the deep purplish-gray like the unmasked color of a bruise, the color it might be below the skin. The short bushes shiver in the breeze, and a scent like his father’s shampoo moves through the air, leaving him startled and confused. Cassidy pushes his body gently out of the way so she can see the numbers. “Two-two-three-one-six,” she says, turning and walking back. “Come on, Hamlin. I know you’re not operating at peak capacity, but pretend, just pretend.” He doesn’t answer; he can hear in her tone that she’s talking to herself. She doesn’t seem to believe he could reply anymore, and it’s not clear to him that she’s wrong.
The lock pops open, releases its key. Inside, the house has an unlived-in feeling, not quite impersonal, but belonging to no specific person. Probably a short-term rental—look it up on the website and book, a 7-percent discount for stays of a week or longer. The sponge is brand-new. There’s no toothpaste in the bathroom. That doesn’t stop Cassidy from eagerly sifting it for signs of her sister’s presence, putting her touch on everything in view. She picks up a ceramic owl and examines the speckled glaze. “Do you think June could have made something like this?” she says out loud, to no response. She likes the thought of her sister learning how to make things out of clay, sitting in some drafty workshop in a smudged apron, focusing on bringing shape into the substance. The way she would smile wide when finishing a task, a favorite smile unfurled in rare and precious moments, always made Cass think, We did it, fuckers, we got out of that family alive, and now we’re thriving and happy, so suck on that!
She lifts the corner of a runner knit from red and purple yarn, replaces it, grabs a long, flexible-necked lighter out of the kitchen drawer, and flicks it on—once, twice, three times. She opens the freezer door, closes it, opens it again. She’s losing patience with these furnishings, feeling more alone every second. The feeling that she’s seeing someone she knows, someone beloved, in all this meaningless stuff is harder to conjure as she notices just how much junk there is in this place, how much junk there is in anyone’s place, how little it says about the person who lives there. It collects like dust, she thinks, like the skin flakes and single hairs. Stuff sloughs from your life and sits in piles in your house. And then, when you’re done, someone gathers it all up, gives some of it away to living people, and throws the rest into the garbage.
The garage is full of plastic-wrapped family packs of WAT-R Ready2Go, stacked waist-high and covered with a layer of fine, light-colored dust from the desert outside. She’s rarely handled a bottle of the stuff except to refuse it, to hand it back. But now, so far from no-home, so deep in the crowded belly of the catastrophe, she reaches through the tear in the wrapping, her wrist rubbing against flaps of plastic, and pulls out a bottle. The bottle looks just like any other, the ribbing of clear plastic around the bottom half, the flimsy label with a photo of a pixelated river and trees. Ready2Go is one of the cheapest lines the company offers, everything about it an afterthought, down to the subslogan: “Water in a small package you can carry in your hand.” She tilts the bottle to the left and right, watching the liquid roll back and forth in smooth languor. She unscrews the cap and holds the open mouth beneath her nose, detecting nothing but a faint, almost indiscernible odor of plastic. She reads the warning on the back: KEEP OUT OF EYES AND NASAL PASSAGES. Suddenly she remembers Patrick, remembers that she has to keep checking on him or something could happen. What thing? She doesn’t know what to worry about, what to watch out for. Most things. Everything.
She doesn’t find him in the kitchen, where the near-empty fridge switches from a cooling roa
r to a soft idle, cycling in and out through periods of temperature adjustment. She doesn’t find him in the living room, standing next to an indoor cactus in a ceramic planter decorated by small multicolored triangles. When she finds him in the bedroom, he is facing the window, looking out to the desert, his hair and body shadowed against the bright, rosy light of the outside. Cassidy says his name—sternly, then softly, then loud enough to call a shout—and still he is staring out the window, unmoving. The sensation of her footsteps, their slight vibration along the carpeting, does not draw his attention. As she walks toward him, one step after another, she begins to feel a strange, cold feeling welling up beneath her heart. She has a vision in her head, a vision of reaching him and placing her hand on his shoulder. He turns around then, at last, but when he turns there’s nothing on his face—just the light and shadow of the room, played out over a featureless terrain, as smooth as the inside of a seashell.
* * *
—
She wakes up horizontal, deep inside a headache. The surface is a sofa, a blocky gray sectional. June would never own a hideous, basic couch like this one, she was always finding treasures at the flea market. There’s something heavy around her and on top of her. When she twists her body, she can see it’s a man; when she twists farther, she can see it’s Patrick, his arms wrapped around her waist like they’re a long-married couple holding each other in chaste, mundane slumber. He has a surprised look on his face, like a person who’s just been awarded a hundred thousand dollars out of the blue. She doesn’t remember allowing their bodies to touch, but she doesn’t remember refusing either. It’s hard to imagine how else she ended up there, her legs braided with his. She tries to push him away, but he’s safely on the inner side, and she ends up heaving herself off the furniture and softly, heavily onto the floor. From there, she scrambles to her feet.
“What is this, what did you do?” Cassidy stands glowering down at him, but he seems as confused as she feels. He looks up at her, opens his mouth, shuts it. In his head, he hears the word Alison, but he can’t say it and he doesn’t know what it is. In the melancholic light, the house doesn’t look uninhabited, it looks abandoned: the traces of daily life all absent, the things on the shelves and in the cupboards just things that nobody would choose to take with them when they leave. She suddenly understands with awful clarity that this is not where June lives at all.
A buzzing sound comes from somewhere on his body. He points at himself and looks up at her, flustered. “Hamlin,” she says disapprovingly, and she leans down and extracts his cellphone from the pocket of his dress shirt. A number with no name attached glows on the screen. She thrusts the phone out toward him as he nods toward her enthusiastically. “No way,” she says, “you have to do it yourself. I’m not your secretary, I don’t answer phones. Your phone, your conversation.” He stares blankly at the small, rectangular brick. “Oh, for god’s sake,” says Cassidy. She presses the green button to receive the call, and holds the phone close to Patrick’s ear.
“Hi, Dad, is that you? Are you there?” says Nora’s voice, thin and fragile through the tiny, invisible speakers. Patrick makes a sound like a grunt, but not quite a grunt. “Dad. You can’t talk?” He makes the sound again, less loud. “Well,” she says with hesitation in her voice, “I guess I’ll just tell you. Maybe it won’t mean anything to you. Then you can get back to whatever you’re doing in California.” She says the word with adolescent hurt in her voice. The sound he makes in response reminds Cassidy of bleating, a sheep sound from a sheep with its mouth taped shut.
“I had a vision of you, Dad,” Nora begins in a serious tone. “You were out in the desert. You weren’t wearing a shirt. There were some houses in the background, but they were far away and there were no people. You were crawling through the sand on your hands and knees; you had dust all over your face and your clothes. There was dust in your mouth, and you didn’t seem to notice. You didn’t seem to care.”
Patrick nods slowly. Cassidy whispers to him that if he wants Nora to hear him he has to make a sound.
“As you crawled, you looked up and around you at these prehistoric trees; instead of leaves, they were covered in spikes; their trunks were shaggy like woolly mammoth legs. Trees that had arms instead of branches, arms like a person’s, thick and reaching out in all different directions. You were frightened of the trees. But then you saw something before you that seemed to make you happy. You smiled a big smile, and you kept crawling forward. But this time, you were looking up at something. Something up above you. You crawled toward it, holding your hand out toward it—like, I don’t know, like you were trying to invite it to come closer. And then I don’t see you anymore. I don’t see you in any more of my visions. You’re just gone.”
There’s a long, deep silence on the phone as Nora waits, her chest tight, hardly breathing. The sound of the cicadas, buzzing and rattling in the cool upstate night, is faint through the earpiece of the phone. On the other end of the line, in a one-bedroom house in Joshua Tree, Patrick sits half slumped on an ugly gray couch, nodding vigorously, nodding as hard as he can.
* * *
—
At night, the desert landscape is made of low and middling shapes, silhouettes cut from pieces of dense, dark blue. The mountains in the background zag dully like an old row of vertebrae, the creature long dead, its form softened by the attrition of sun and grit and wind. The stiff, dry vegetation looks blurry in the night, the edges gently furred. Above it all, the crescent moon like a long white tooth. In the unseen spaces behind rocks or scrub, in the between-brush, where its coat blends with the white-blue earth, a coyote carries on a conversation with itself, yelping and moaning, answering its call with a long, rising cackle. It multiplies its voice as it crosses the sands, laughing and whining and wailing like a thing with its leg in the trap, broadcasting the presence of a whole pack of loud, hungry bodies. As it passes out of view and into other places, the sounds fade without ever ending. Eventually, the night is quiet again, and still. In the sky, the stars are so many that the darkness seems to be smeared with light.
From the southwest, where the low-lying mountains rear up over the sands, a whiteness surfaces at the dark edge of the peak. It grows and collects there, a space of light color in a field of night. Then it begins to move: a snake of animate fog, scaling the mountain ridge and sliding down the rough slope like a soundless avalanche. As it descends, it spreads, widens, blankets the mountainside in a white that cancels sight. A color that cancels sound. This smooth layer of fog makes the night more silent, more hushed. Birds don’t fly within its muffling calm, the big-eyed desert rats don’t leave their holes. When the white veil passes over an insect singing on its perch of bramble, the song stops. As the fog reaches the desert floor, it slows for a moment in indecision, considering its next move. And then, like a creature unobserved, it chooses a direction. It turns right, crawling across the dry valley floor, over the rubble of sand-colored granite, over sage and scrub and dry, scratchy thornbush until it reaches its endpoint. When it stops, it seems to grow solid. It sits beneath the cold, hard moon, thickening and collecting, growing murky like a glass of milk, until nothing can be seen but the white below and the dark far above.
* * *
—
The morning reminds him of being a child again, waking into a summer day with nothing to do, the joy of remembering this fact, the feeling of dawning, cresting optimism, an excitement for what lies ahead. When he was young, very young, he used to love going to the beach, running along the margin of damp, firm sand, fleeing the perimeter of foaming surf as it came for him, then turning to jump and land feetfirst right in the midst of the swirling shallow. He was taught to wriggle his toes where the sand bubbled with pocks and holes from the life breathing underneath, to uncover the baubles like fat limestone teardrops and place them in the watery pail for eating later. He learned to pack a pail for a sand castle, to turn it over roughly so the san
d wouldn’t have a chance to rethink its shape. There was the smell of salt, stronger each time the waves came crashing in, and of some lifelike, vital substance he only knew to think of as the taste of a body turned inside out, like when you bite the inside of your cheek and taste blood or cry so heavily that the snot trails all the way to your lips. When he got home, he would stand and pee into the bone-white bowl of the downstairs toilet and recognize the seaside smell in his urine, his body a balloon full of ocean waters and ocean salts, a naked, soft-skinned version of the long-ago fish that crawled up onto the shore with the sea’s sweat and tears sealed up in its vessel.
Now, as he rises from the stranger’s furniture, he recognizes the feeling of a beach morning, the first waking thought in your head the last you had from the night before. The knowledge that you were going someplace good was a powerful pill that kept you from falling asleep and made your waking sharper. As he looks out the picture window, he recognizes the familiar sight: sand as far as the eye can see, a soft, yielding floor that grows so warm under the sun and feels soft on the skin even though it is made of stone. Yes, the sound is different, he admits to himself as he steps out the front door and into his surroundings. More of a crunch than a whisper, and as he walks the big, round grains don’t stick to the soles of his feet, they just fall off. It’s a long way to the waterline, he can tell, but that’s not unusual. During the busiest summer weekends, there were sometimes so many people at the beach that they had to park in the third overflow lot, not even the second, and the lot was so far from the water that for the first few blocks they walked on pitch-black asphalt, unmarked by even a grain of sand.
Something New Under the Sun Page 29
