And he saw something. He would never have noticed it, if she hadn’t pointed it out to him first. Static was static, meaningless, just noise, confusion, chaos.
But with a quiet shock of comprehension he found he could actually see something there. Some kind of definite order, inside that boiling sea of hissing multicolored flecks. A movement, a form, something that almost made sense to him, just past the edge of his understanding. A nibbling, brain-itching thing, like an oiled key that would open a new world up, with the proper focus, with the proper twist …
“Holy smoke,” he said, staring. “Have they got satellite TV in this dump? That’s some kind of interference pattern, or something. What the hell is it?”
Irene stared raptly into the set. The fear had faded from her face. “It has beauty,” she said.
Jim stared again. “What the heck kind of … did you mess with the hookup? Turn off the VCR.”
“Not yet,” she said. “It is … too interesting.”
He leaned over angrily, snapped the recorder off.
The TV jumped immediately into a network morning show, cheerful grainy-faced network idiots.
“How’d you do that, huh? What buttons did you push?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I look, that’s all. I look very hard. Only confusing, at first. But then, I can see it!”
The anger fled out of him. That odd, creeping pattern had put him off, deflated him. He looked at his ruined porn tapes, but couldn’t recapture his spontaneous feeling of rage. She’d been a fool to interfere with him, but she couldn’t control him. He could always get more porn, if he wanted. “You’ve got no right to mess with my stuff,” he told her, but without the same conviction.
“It make me sick,” she said, and caught him with her cold blue stare. “You should not look at whores.”
“Well it’s … it’s none of your—Look, just don’t do anything like that again. Never, understand?”
She watched him, her eyes fixed and opaque. “Are you leaving me, now? It’s because I didn’t let you, that’s why. If I had let you last night, you would not now be angry with me.”
“God, don’t start that again,” Jim said. He slung the black baseball cap over his head.
One of his nostrils had cleared, during the night. Dry, crusted, but open. He was breathing again. A minor miracle.
They hit phones in little towns all the way down the highway. In Belen, Bernardo, Sorocco, Truth or Consequences. Jim pushed the pace hard. He would have liked some handy way to make her suffer. Dumping her on the side of the road was somehow just not enough, not a real option. There was some kind of contest of wills going on, with terms he didn’t fully understand.
But there didn’t seem to be much he could do to impress her—sullen silence, she didn’t seem to mind; they skipped lunch, but she didn’t seem to notice.
He couldn’t forget that remark she’d made about the Gulag. Jim knew well enough what a gulag was: a Soviet labor camp, not just “stir” but the real thing. In some way he’d always hated authority, but he’d never done time for it, never faced them down, never walked the walk in the open, where they could spot him. In the back of his mind, though, he’d known somehow that the whole giddy rootless business would all catch up with him, that someday sure as hell they were going to take him down, some clerk, some straight, noticing him and calling the heat, and then some polite cop with a clipboard: Would you pull over sir, may I see your ID please …
And then interrogators: Do you mean to tell us sir that you have been an invisible man, that you have been living entirely from the proceeds of phone booth robberies for eight years …
“Stop that,” Irene said.
“Huh?”
“You are grinding your teeth.”
“Oh,” Jim said. He’d been driving on automatic pilot, the road beneath the wheels like a half-seen vapor. Suddenly the world around them sprang into his conscious mind, overcast February sky and the scrub of sprawling desert, a road sign.… “Whoa!” he said, and hit the brake. “White Sands National Monument! I’ll be damned.”
He left the interstate, hit Highway 70 east. “White Sands! Man, I haven’t seen that in years. Wow, White Sands. Can’t pass that one up.”
“We are going to El Paso. Is what you said,” Irene protested.
“So what? White Sands is out of this world.”
“You tell me El Paso.”
“So? We can do whatever we want, no one’s looking.” He grinned at her, enjoying her discomfort. “White Sands is fantastic, you won’t regret this.”
She looked unhappy about it, something gnawing at her. It came out at last. “The missile range is in White Sands.”
“Oh,” Jim said, straightfaced. “You know that already, huh? Gosh, that’s too bad, Irene. I was gonna sell you to the U.S. Army, for missile practice.”
“What?”
“Yeah, the Army buys Russians, and they stake ’em out on ground zero! I figured I could clear three, maybe four hundred bucks, easy.”
She fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. “Very funny joke, Jim. Ha, ha. But I not going to let you. Even if we go in the desert. Where no one is looking.”
“Jeez, lighten up, will you? You sure got a big opinion of yourself. If I had a real-life American gal to talk to, you’d just be a goddamn conversation piece.”
She didn’t understand, but knew enough to take it as an insult. She made no reply, but blew smoke over the dashboard, and looked remote and icy. Jim loaded music to cover the silence.
It had been a long time since he’d seen White Sands. Gypsum dunes, crystal dust. It had been the bottom of a sea once, now it was a sea all its own. In constant invisible movement: slow winds blowing sand waves in dry cascades.
Vast slumbering dunes, a trillion random specks somehow sifting into grace and order. There was life here, fierce little bushes, and strange spiky mats, with names he didn’t know. White against white against white, and above it a sky with clouds that looked gray by contrast: a sky whose blue had deepened to the clotted crawling color of mid-ocean.
Jim paid their entrance fee. They drove silently, for miles, deep into the park. At last Jim killed the engine, got out, slammed the door. “You coming?” he said.
For a moment, he thought she wouldn’t move, that she’d sit there and sulk and outface him. But then she jumped out, stiffly, hugging her ribs. Jim locked the van tight, and they started walking. A cold wind. He headed for the horizon.
They climbed the dunes, Irene pacing along behind him, her face set stoically. The sand was stealthy and crept invisibly into everything; by the time they’d gone a mile he had a pint of it in each boot.
Finally they were utterly alone. No human trace or artifact, nothing but the sky and the fantastic looming forms of earth. Jim turned up the collar of his sheepskin coat and stood ankle deep in the loose crest of a dune. Irene whipped her scarf off, combed sullenly at her hair with her fingers. She was pale, and her down jacket was zipped to the neck.
“Great, isn’t it?” he said.
She said nothing.
He spun around in place, swinging both arms, scanning the horizon. “Can you feel anything out here, Irene?”
She shook her head. “Feel what? Nothing.”
“That’s freedom,” he said. “This is what real freedom feels like. See? No eyes, no rules. No laws, no judgments, no good or bad. Nothing but you and me.”
“Not a good place for living,” she said. “Good for killing, maybe.”
“Yeah, the best place in the world for target practice,” he said. “That’s why the Army uses it.” Jim felt reckless, loose in his knees and elbows. He pointed. “See that little bush over there? Watch this.”
He stopped, reached into his right boot, pulled the .38. He steadied his right wrist left-handed, sighted down his arm.
Blam. Blam. Blam. Sand spurted around the bush’s scabby roots. There was something about the smooth vicious kick of the gun that hit him like a drug. Out banging red-hot metal
into dust, a true kick, pure as crystal. He turned to her with a grin.
She had her gun with her. It had been stuck in the waist of her jeans, hidden under the jacket. Now she had it centered on his chest.
Jim’s blind elation collapsed within him, folded up and vanished, like a daydream.
The silly grin still hung on his face. He could feel himself goggling at her. His face felt like a mask, like the cold rubber skin on a plucked chicken. He couldn’t seem to speak. Fear had him by the neck. Real terror, realer somehow than any other kind of feeling. As if he’d been a fool to ever feel anything else.
Slowly, very carefully, he lowered his right arm. He pointed at the bush with his left. “There you go,” he croaked.
Irene swung the gun away from him. She held the pistol at arm’s length, not bothering to aim, and squeezed off two rounds. Tremendous blasts; sand jumped from a distant dune, two sharp flurries, like the last kicks of a gut-shot deer.
Jim licked his lips. “Boy,” he said. “That’s some precision shooting.”
“My husband teached me,” Irene said. “It was his gun, he buy it. He said we need a gun, for KGB agents, or American criminals. Always need a gun, yes?”
“Yeah,” Jim said, “that’s what I always figured, myself.”
“You have three bullets left,” she remarked. “I have only one.”
They stood in frozen tableau for a long moment. “Getting pretty cold out here,” Jim said at last, still gripping his pistol. “Better get back to the van, huh?”
Irene moved deliberately. She cocked the hammer back, put the pistol’s chromed cylinder against the sleeve of her jacket, rolled it down her arm. There was a crisp mechanical ratcheting as the chambers spun at random. “My dead husband,” she said. Her voice shook. “He never understood the truth about guns. He was not very … what is word? Practice.”
“Not very practical,” Jim said.
“Yes. For him, gun was a clever toy. You think the same, too? Die the same way, maybe.”
“Did you shoot him?” Jim said.
“No,” she said. “He kill himself, trying to clean this thing.”
Without warning, she squeezed the trigger. A hollow click.
Irene smiled tightly, lifted the gun, leveled it carefully at him. “Do I try again?”
“No. There’s no need for this.”
“What does that mean?” she said.
He babbled the first thing that sprang into his head. “I don’t want you to die,” he said. He didn’t want her to die? A damn weird thing to say while he was staring into her gun barrel. But something, some basic kind of common sense, had forced the words out of him.
“I just want you to live,” he said. “Both of us. We should live, that’s all.”
She was thinking about it. Hard.
“Give me your keys,” she told him. “This nothing place … a good place for me to learn to drive.” Irene smiled bleakly. “No one to run over, yes? I save everyone’s life, out here.”
Jim fished the keys, left-handed, from his pocket. He hefted them. “You sure you can find your way back, all alone? It’s a long walk. No footprints left, either. Kind of cold and windy, lately.”
She thought it over for a moment, with a spasm of irritation. “Throw down your gun,” she told him. “We will walk back, first, then I will see the car.”
Jim juggled the keys left-handed. “This is getting complicated, isn’t it.”
“Throw down the gun. Now.”
He lifted his left hand. He kept talking. “I could throw these keys, y’know. They’d hit the sand, probably vanish from sight. You’d be left with a locked car, on a damn cold night.”
“And you would be dead out here, yes? Instead of me, like you wanted.” Her teeth were chattering.
With great, grave slowness, Jim lifted his right arm. The gun was a leaden weight in his sweat-chilled grip, full of stubborn momentum. He kept the muzzle away from her, pointed at the empty horizon.
BLAM. In his peripheral vision, the distant spurt of dust. BLAM.
He spun the cylinder against his thigh. Death’s roulette wheel. The certainty of that last bullet was gone, into randomness, into free possibility. “Now we’re in the same boat,” he said.
“Yes.”
“What the hell.” He tossed the gun to his feet, lifted both his arms wide open. An embrace for the wind.
She didn’t believe him, at first. She watched him as if it were some kind of stunt, a magic trick, so he could blow her away with his empty hands. He stood waiting.
She dropped her gun, her eyes fixed on his.
“Let’s go,” he said, and ran down the face of the dune.
She came sliding behind him. At the bottom, she caught his arm. Her face was flushed. Suddenly he kissed her, not much of a kiss, a quick glancing collision of their lips. A salute, and maybe just to see what it was like.
“I didn’t mean to be so scary,” he said.
No answer.
“I wouldn’t have done anything to you. I didn’t come here for that.”
“Yes, sure,” she said.
The sun was setting. They were chilly and walked fast. For a bad moment he thought he’d lost his sense of direction, lost the van. They would freeze to death together, turn to mummies, vanish slowly under the dunes … He said nothing about it, walked on grim and tight-lipped … and there it was.
They got in. Jim fired the engine, set the heater on. “We could sleep in the van tonight. The stars out here in the desert … man.”
She stretched her hands over the heater duct, shivering. “I want to leave this White Sands. It frightens me.”
“I’m sorry about all that,” he told her, his voice still giddy. Giddy from the sheer vivid strangeness of being alive. “I get carried away sometimes. A man lives alone … kinda loses his sense of proportion. And the desert does funny things to your head.”
“Trinity,” she said.
“What?”
“Manhattan Project,” she said. “At Los Alamos. Americans, alone in the desert.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I guess we invented that.”
“But now it is everywhere,” she said. She stared out into a purplish darkness, bruise-colored light settling over the quiet geometries of sand. “Get away from this place, Jim.”
“Yeah, okay.” He threw the van into gear.
He chased his headlights down the poorly marked trail. Irene shrank in on herself, into silence. She seemed haunted, unsure of anything. Later the park’s headquarters was a dim flat-topped bulk. Then they hit the pavement. Jim pushed the needle up.
“El Paso,” he said. “I think I’m up for it.” His armpits itched fiercely with the smothered sweat of fear. “We can sleep there tonight. I’m up to the drive. Man, I may drive all night. You ever see Texas? You can drive forever in Texas.”
He reached for a tape to paper over the depth of silence. He picked one, glanced at its label.
Suddenly the cassette in his grip disgusted him. Something he had heard a thousand times, wrapped himself up in, but now the magic of it was simply and suddenly gone for him. Like eating too much chocolate, like the final rancid puff on a cigar.
He flung the tape onto the floorboards. He leaned back, gripped the wheel. He felt vaguely dizzy suddenly, carsick, nervous, bad. “Do me a favor, okay?” he said. “Find me something on the radio.”
Irene leaned over, began twisting dials. Screech, distant choked babble, cosmic hissing. The frying sounds of chaos.
“That’s enough,” he said.
“No,” she said, “listen to it …”
“No.” He snapped the radio off. “Let’s just drive.”
He pushed it up to seventy.
“Jim,” she said.
“Now what?”
“There’s something wrong with the road.”
“There can’t be,” he said. “This is the highway, damn it.” He gripped the wheel, squinted, rushed into the white torrent.
The thrum of tir
es went silent. They were coasting.
He pumped the gas, twice. A sullen roar from the engine, as if they were out of gear. He grabbed the gearshift, jerked it: a hollow loose-tooth feel, like a stripped transmission. “What the hell?”
“There is no road left,” she said.
“There’s gotta be a road.” He pumped the brake. “Jesus, I can’t feel anything …”
“We are floating,” she said.
Jim wiped at the cold windshield, bare-handed. Before them the world had gone gray, misty, all to hissing bits and pieces. The van had the giddy stomach-clutching feel of an elevator, a closed steel box sliding through the nowhere zone between floors.
“We are lost,” Irene said sadly. “It is all over, there is nothing left.”
Jim took his hands from the wheel. It was moving on its own, like a wobbly compass needle. He pulled his booted feet up from the floorboards suddenly, as if there were something there to bite him.
He turned to Irene. For some reason his eyes were full of sudden tears: terror, frustration. Loss. “What is this place?”
She shrugged. A fatalism, something far past despair. It occurred to him then that he knew this place. Both of them knew it, they knew it very well. It was a place they’d been destined for, driving toward, all of their lives. It was the end of the world.
He felt at the window, bare-handed, grabbed at the door. “Don’t get out,” she warned.
The metal door handle was bitingly icy under his fingertips. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess that’s not too smart.” He wiped at his eyes, beneath the glasses. “Jesus, I feel sick.”
The steering wheel moved spookily through its own arcs. “I’m gonna open the window,” he said suddenly. “And look outside.”
Her voice was leaden. “Why?”
“Why?” he said shrilly. “Because it’s my nature, that’s why.” He rolled the window down an inch.
Outside it was very bad. No air, nothing: the endless electric snow of dead televisions. The van’s steel box was embedded in chaos, drifting in it. He put the tinted window up. Silence.
“What did you see?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Confusion, snow. It’s nothing. Nothing at all. But, kind of, anything, too. If you know what I mean.”
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