Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  The repetitiveness of the work is calming, but today she can’t stop thinking about the sounds she heard over the phone right before Cassidy Carter hung up: the screeching of implied wheels, the unseen, unknown quantity of her husband’s body dashing between them. She struggles to imagine him sick, delirious, dying out there alone, but her mind just keeps conjuring Patrick home with the flu, grouchily demanding homemade soup. There’s something terrifying about the absence of images here, those sounds the only trace of a larger mangle, flesh against steel against plastic. Like the problem with WAT-R that Patrick alluded to on the phone, simultaneously alarming and utterly abstract: the substance real and material somewhere utterly out of sight. Alison lifts the cover of the icemaker, thrusts her bare arms into the chill to scoop clattering heaps of ice into pitchers and carry them over to the faucet.

  She takes the first pitcher and holds it under the tap, letting the water level rise to the lip. She does the same thing again and again, and she’s about to set the last pitcher aside when she notices something odd in the water: it could be something she’s never noticed before, but are those suds gathered at the top normal? They seem to linger just a moment too long, the water goes from white to clear, but not clear enough—so she pours the whole thing down the drain and starts again. The new fill is better, calmer and less sudsy, but the water looks different—bluer than usual? Something mournful in the color? Something wrong? She pours out the pitcher and starts over. She fills the pitchers, holds each one up to the light, and starts again, over and over and over.

  When Nora enters, she finds her mother staring down at twelve pitchers full of water and an assortment of glassware, the vessels filled to different levels with liquid. “Sweetie, come over here,” her mother calls. “I need you to look at something.” Nora comes close. The glasses and pitchers look normal—it’s their arrangement that seems strange to her, huddled together like survivors in the aftermath of disaster. It looks like a video she once watched on the internet, where an old man standing in front of a table set with half-filled glasses played a medley of pop songs by running a wet finger over the rims, but there’s no music, and no laughter from the studio audience. The man was old in the nineties, so Nora is pretty sure he’s no longer alive—just as with most older movies and TV shows, where every adult’s performance is like an obituary to itself. “Look at the water,” Alison says quietly. “Does it look right to you?” Nora looks at the water, but the water just sits there. She tries to look harder, but her attention seems to drift from the water to her mother again and again, and she wonders if her mother is the one in trouble. How much worry is too much worry, how much sad is too much sad? Her mother’s face has deep lines between the eyebrows; Nora can’t remember if they’ve always been there. If all the adults were destroyed, who would she take with her for her survival group? Sometimes at night, as she waits to fall asleep, she assembles a team: Kelsey and Janine, Esther, Otto, and Miguel. Skinny, lisping Thomas. All of them walking the country road toward Oswego, walking without fear on the yellow center line, talking loudly and without thought of being overheard, about how to remake their world.

  * * *

  —

  Cassidy presses her back against the cool side of a boulder, the granite rasping against her skin. Patrick’s footprints vanished a half-mile back, but with hours between her and the noplace she had come from, it was less pointless just to continue searching. An image in her mind of a woman sweeping the desert floor with a broom, erasing signs. It’s been hours, and the water is nearly gone. But the sun is sinking too, and as the color above grows dark, a chill winds through the desert like a snake. What she felt in the days after escaping over the white stucco wall of the house in Greece was an emptiness, a lightness, almost as if the umbilical cord that bound her to her surroundings had been cut. It felt like a secret had been revealed: the world had ended, and still she hung around, feeling aches in her bones, feeling hunger, digging burrs out of her gauzy cotton blouse. As she wandered through the steep countryside, avoiding the paved roads she thought they might be patrolling, she shed her clothes, her face wash, her luggage, everything except for the passport and wallet. An empty space where hope should be, an empty space where fear should be. And so the feelings of hope and fear drift through that space like clouds through the sky, filling you with temporary fear, temporary hope. This moment is like that one, her fate decided but unknown.

  A hundred or so feet away, dim in the twilight, she sees a pattern in the sand. From close up, the shapes are clearly footprints: a man’s dress shoe, smooth and elongated, trailing off into the Mojave. The sky crowded with clouds. She follows the footprints out toward the horizon line, ever present, ever receding.

  * * *

  —

  The fires smolder black and orange in the canyon behind Secret Sunset, unwatched. Ditches have been dug around glowing, smoking earth, a moat to defend the big, expensive houses, their lawns and landscaping still green. The ground is dark, powdery, and fine; pale ashes waft in a breeze from nowhere, and life is already growing back. Nourished by the heat of nearby flames, tiny blue flowers peek through the carbonized earth, their buds opening to face the unearthly light. Across the canyon, a younger fire burns; the trucks use hoses to dampen the ground, and overhead a helicopter releases a tankload of WAT-R to quench the flames. The doused earth hisses, a hot blue mist rises toward the sky. Small blue flowers melting, spreading. “This one is making a run for the freeway,” says one firefighter to another. High above the earth, an amalgamation of vapors. The night clouds, dry and immobile, glowing peach and lilac in the darkening sky.

  * * *

  —

  The feel of it on her shoulders is cold, sudden. It takes a moment to comprehend that this is water falling from the sky: desert rain, out of season. Cassidy turns her face up to meet it, the drops heavy, thick, as sloppy as tears. Wetness runs off her brow and into her hair, sombering the blond. The nearby bushes exhale a surreal scent, like dried flowers coming back to life. Suddenly she realizes that this rain will wash away the footsteps of whoever she’s been following, will wash away any trace of where Patrick’s been or where he’s gone. It will wipe from the earth every trace of her own path home. With no way back, the only way is forward. It’s like that scene in season five of Kassi Keene where Kassi escapes from kidnappers in the middle of a vast redwood forest, only this time the park ranger won’t find her in the nick of time, hypothermic and dehydrated. Only this time all does seem to be truly, irrecoverably lost. The strange rain sloughs through the desert floor, carving channels where they never existed before. Loneliness is a blue mist tinging everything it touches. Slender branches shudder under the weight of the sky.

  * * *

  —

  WAT-R enters the opening of a body. It slides over the lips, the tongue, the soft palate, and into the darkness. It leaves behind a tasteless, odorless film, a lip-gloss shine on the living membrane. Inside the throat, the muscles contract and relax, directing liquid down smooth tubes. There’s an unusual feeling, the feeling that the WAT-R is lodged there still, fuller than it should be. Solid somehow, unwilling to dispel. In the stomach, the ball of WAT-R crosses membrane walls unseen, traveling the body circuit. Large molecules leach through the perimeter of cells, but some get stuck. Lodged within the brain and liver and heart, the substance lingers like a memory, a memory of nothing. It fills itself into invisible gaps, completing the surface, making each organ gleam like living plastic. What’s left over joins the rivers, the streams, the sea, the sky: a residue from elsewhere, a voracious stain, enduring traces of something manufactured, never born.

  * * *

  —

  She runs hard into the middle distance, following the fading trail. The rain runs down her cheeks and into her mouth; she wipes it from the hollows of her eyes, but the wet comes back. As the last daylight vanishes behind the ridge, she’s not sure if she’s still on the path or jus
t chasing gradations of shadow, variations on the incidental. It’s raining all around her, but somehow her feet are dry. Far ahead, she sees a silhouette on the dim horizon, perched against rain-hazy sky. As she runs, she calls out to it or him or her, trying to avoid the spiny chollas and outstretched snags of sage and creosote, trying not to scream, trying not to fall. Thin red lines trail her calves up to her thighs; the rain smell is close and warm, like a living, breathing thing. No one ever sees a mirage: they see a real thing and know it to be false, or, more often, they don’t. And nothing is more real than that which you reach for and discover is not there.

  * * *

  —

  As she nears the human-shaped shadow, something makes her want to hesitate. Who waits out in the desert, far from any landmark, anyplace with a name, and won’t even lift a hand to shield themselves from the falling rain? What type of person? What type of thing? The shape she sees, narrow and upright, could be a man or a figment, a tall ocotillo shrouded in fog. But as she steps forward, she begins to make out the details of the gray wool suit, crisp and pristine though he stands in the downpour. She had been so careful, so disciplined, and now she can’t believe what she’s seeing, can’t believe what’s not there.

  * * *

  —

  The man is smiling, his hair is dry, he has a kind face—or maybe only a familiar one. A long nose and a jawline as deliberate as a stroke of pen on paper. Cassidy can’t place him, maybe he’s someone she’s seen on TV. As she steps closer, he seems to nod encouragingly, warmly, his eyes some forgettable color. She stops, watching him from across a twelve-foot span of sand and scrub. Neither one moves; no word disturbs the silence. Then, with a small smooth gesture, he lifts his right arm and extends an open hand in her direction. He’s beckoning her near. He has something he wants to tell her. The first thing she thinks is how long it’ll take the tabloids to get the story: One week? Three? For better or worse, celebrity bodies usually get found.

  * * *

  —

  High above the desert, the sky is crowded with clouds. There’s nothing near her, no sound, no movement. She tries to remember a few last favorite things: Tiny the dog in his miniature sailor suit, the lilac flavor of June’s hair brushing her lips as they hugged each other tight. Most of it comes back blank, but the space is still there, like a monument to a battle where hundreds of people were killed, the plaque sitting in front of an empty green field. Cassidy remembers that she might cry now, but her eyes feel so dry. Cassidy, Cass, Butch to those whom she held closest. She takes one step forward, then another, another. She looks one more time at her hands. At the sky. There’s nothing to do now but step into the nothing. With no fear, no hesitation, she’s lost the words for the feelings she doesn’t have, she reaches out and places her pale palm in the gray-suited man’s long, unreal hand.

  * * *

  —

  His skin is cool to the touch, but he smells like burning.

  * * *

  —

  From the vantage point of the desert sand, daylight flashes on and off a thousand times in succession, strobelike. The stars wheel overhead, a spatter of light rotating beyond reach and nearly beyond sight. For a while, there are automobiles and caravans, then long stretches of silence. Occasional fires in the distal cities, fierce rains that batter the roofs of untended homes. In the foreground, the cactuses multiply like rabbits, clusters of sharp spines growing dense, leaving only a ribcage-width for the coyote to guide its narrow body through. Nothing lasts until it lasts, and nothing is without its end.

  * * *

  —

  The new flora is plasticky and hard-edged: circular blooms the color of watered-down sky, edging their way into the desert from the coast. There are chunks of concrete rubbled among real rocks, irregular shapes whose texture holds a false smoothness. Steel frames where buildings once stood, tiny shards of color indelible in the sand. When the sea rejoins the desert plains, eons have passed and a lone bird lights on the twist of a bough, a bird of a different shape. Pale-skinned whales breach where towering cliffs had stood, reptile-fish flash bright in the shallows. Strange mammals, dark nights. A paw print larger than what they once called a dinner plate. The sun rises and sets in the longer after, without name or recognition.

  * * *

  —

  In the long before, there were rivers that tumbled from the mountain chill into the sweet-smelling flatlands. The water ran cool in the heat of the summer and you could see stones at the river floor, gray-brown and russet, clear and close as if they were laid in the palm of your hand. Where night met morning, the mountain lion would slake its thirst as the deer bent to drink, the same river cupped in the bodies of predator and prey. You could wade shin-deep into the running and gaze down at your own two feet, pale as cave fishes in the morning bright. In the cold, every muscle of the foot felt as if it was outlined in pure, sweet light, the pain like the ache of too much running, too much life. With your eyes closed, you stood there growing colder, growing numb, until the cold was gone and your body was absent too, the feeling of nothing, the feeling of movement, the feeling of being river, of keeping the cycle, of rushing downstream to the open sea.

  THEY’RE ALL FOR GILVARRY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Claudia Ballard, Alexis Washam, Anna Kelly, Jillian Buckley, and Carrie Neill for the hard work and care that sustained this book. To Sara Reggiani, Leonardo Taiuti, Peter Haag, and Patrick Sielemann. To Joshua Fisher and others at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and to my colleagues and students at the New School. Time spent at the American Academy in Rome, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts made it possible to put the words in place.

  Thank you to Rosa Handelman, Hermione Hoby, JW McCormack, Maya Singer, Eric Chinski, Rivka Galchen, Liz Moore, Ben Marcus, Nora MacLeod, and Andrew Eckholm for time, effort, support, and friendship. To Terry and Faye Kleeman for their unflagging love, and to Peter, Vilma, and Kara Gilvarry. And to Alex Gilvarry, my first reader and favorite author, thank you for giving me someone to write for.

  BY ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN

  Something New Under the Sun (2021)

  Intimations (2016)

  You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015)

  ABOUT

  THE

  AUTHOR

  Alexandra Kleeman is the author of Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others, and her nonfiction has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, n+1, and The Guardian. In 2020, she was awarded the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize. She lives on Staten Island with her husband, the writer Alex Gilvarry, and teaches at the New School.

  alexandrakleeman.com

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