Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  The Joshua tree “thinks” in covert bursts of activity:

  Oh, I have made a terrible mistake.

  Oh, please get me out of it, get me out of it, send me home.

  “The headache,” she calls the odd pressure at first. “The green headache.”

  “Psychosis,” at 4 a.m., when its power over her crests and she lies awake terrified. “Torpor” or “sluggishness” when it ebbs.

  Had you told her, The invader is sinking its roots throughout you, tethering itself to you with a thousand spectral feelers—who knows what she would have done?

  * * *

  The next day, they wake at dawn, as per their original plan: to start every day at sunup and navigate by whim. They go north on 247, with vague plans to stop in Barstow for gas. The girl’s eyes are aching. Partway across the Morongo Basin, she starts to cry so hard that the boy is forced to pull over.

  “Forget it,” she says.

  “Forget what?”

  “It. All of it. The seafaring stuff—I can’t do it anymore.”

  The boy blinks at her. “It’s been four days.”

  But her lips look blue, and she won’t be reasonable.

  “Leave me here.”

  “You don’t have any money.”

  “I’ll work. They’re hiring everywhere in town, did you notice that?” A job sounds unaccountably blissful to the girl. Drinking water in the afternoon. Sitting at a desk.

  “What? What the hell are you talking about?”

  The boy scowls down at his arm, flipped outward against the steering wheel. She keeps talking to him in a new, low monotone, telling him that she loves the desert, she loves the Joshua trees, she wants to stay. Dumbly, he rereads his own tattoo: EVER UNFIXED. For some reason, he finds that he cannot quite blame the girl for ruining things. It’s the plan he hates, their excellent plan, for capsizing on them.

  The crumbly truth: the boy imagined that he’d be the one to betray the girl.

  “Andy, I’m sorry. But I know that I belong here.”

  “Okay, just to be clear: When you say ‘here,’ you mean this parking lot?” The sedan is parked outside Cojo’s Army Surplus and Fro-Yo; it’s a place where you can purchase camo underwear and also a cup of unlicensed TCBY swirl. “Or do you mean this?” He waves his arms around to indicate the desert.

  Had they continued, just a short distance northwest of Yucca Valley they would have reached the on-ramp to I-15 north and, beyond that, the pinball magic of the tollbooths, that multiverse of possible futures connected by America’s interstate system.

  For the next two hours, they fight inside the car.

  Round clusters of leaves shake loose in front of her eyes, greeny-white blossoms. If she could only show him the desert in her imagination, Angie thinks, the way she sees it.

  When it becomes clear that she’s not joking, the boy turns the car around. Calls Cousin Sewell in Pennsylvania, explains their situation. “We want to stay awhile,” he says. “We like it here.”

  Sewell needs to know how long. They’ll have to put the car on some conveyance, get it back to Pennsylvania.

  “Indefinitely,” the boy hears himself say. Her word, for what she claims to want.

  They decide to pay the weekly rate at the motel. They go for walks. They go for drives. Her favorite thing seems to be sitting in a dry wreck of a turquoise Jacuzzi they discover on the edge of town, some luckless homesteader’s abandoned pleasure tub. And he likes this, too, actually—sitting in the tub, he finds it easy to pretend that they aren’t trapped in a tourist town, that they are sailing toward an elsewhere. And he loves what happens to her face right at sunset over the infinite desert. Moonlight, however, affects her in a way that he finds indescribably frightening. The change is in the eyes, he thinks.

  II. EMERGENCE

  Two weeks later, in late April, their money runs out. They’ve spent the days outside, Angie doing stretches in the motel courtyard, Andy reading his stolen library books from back east, waiting for the bad enchantment to break. Andy tells Angie he is leaving her. They have no vehicle, the rental Dodge having been chauffeured east by a genial grifter pal of Sewell’s. Angie nods, staring out the window of their room as the rain sweeps over the desert. All the muddy colors of the sky touch the earth.

  “Did you hear me? I said I’m leaving, Angie.”

  That afternoon, Andy gets a job at the Joshua Tree Saloon.

  Then there is a period of peace, coinciding with the Joshua tree’s dormancy inside Angie, which lasts from April to mid-May. In the park, the Joshuas’ blossoms have all dropped off, leaving dried stalks. Andy does not even suggest “moving on” anymore, so thrilled is he to laugh with Angie again. He comes home with green fistfuls of tourist cash, reeking of Fireball and Pine-Sol. Okay, he thinks. Oh, thank God. We’re getting back to normal.

  Then one day, after a spectacular freak thundershower, Angie tells him that he needs to go home. Or away. Elsewhere, a bedroom other than the motel.

  She feels terrible, she doesn’t know what she is saying.

  Get me out of it, the plant keeps throbbing like a muscle in Angie’s mind. A rustling sound in her inner ear, the plant’s footsteps. A throaty appetite makes her imagine stuffing herself with hot mouthfuls of desert sand. Once Andy leaves her, she’ll have a chance to inspect her interior, figure out what’s gone haywire.

  “Let’s go to Reno,” Andy says. He feels quite desperate now, spinning the radio dial through seas of static. His great success this week at work was formalizing, via generous pours of straight gin, a new friendship with Jerry the Mailman, who has given him access to his boxy truck.

  “Go to Reno. Win big. I’ll be right here. I don’t want to leave the desert.”

  Why doesn’t she? The girl grows hysterical whenever Andy drives toward the freeway that might carry them away from the Mojave. She feels best when they are close to Warren Peak and the Black Rock Canyon campground.

  For the next two weeks, she keeps encouraging Andy to leave her. Sometimes she feels a lump in her throat that she can’t swallow, and it’s easy to pretend that this is a vestige of who she used to be, her Pennsylvania history, now compacted into a hard ball she cannot access or dissolve; for Andy’s sake, she wishes she could be that girl again. Dimly she is aware that she used to crave travel, adventure. She can remember the pressure of Andy’s legs tangled around her, but not what she held in her mind. The world has grown unwieldy, and there are days now when the only thing that appeals to her is pulling up her T-shirt and going belly flat on the burning pink sand beyond the motel walkway.

  One night, Angie turns to face the wall. Golf-ball-sized orange-and-yellow flowers pattern their wallpaper. Plus water stains from ancient leaks. She has never noticed this before. Under the influence of the Joshua, she sees these water stains as beautiful. That Rorschach is more interesting than TV. “What do you see?” she asks the boy.

  “I’m not in the mood,” he says, having at last been granted the opportunity to have a mood, after days and hours spent trying to rekindle her appetite for pleasure, for danger. He realizes that he has cut all ties for her, that he has nothing he wants to return to in Pennsylvania. It’s a liberating, terrifying feeling. If she leaves him—if he leaves her—what then?

  * * *

  Now the plant is catching on to something.

  In its three months of incubation, it grows exponentially in its capacity for thought. Gradually, the plant learns to “think” blue, to “smell” rain through a nose.

  Unfurling its languorous intelligence, it looks out through her eyes, hunting for meaning the way it used to seek out deep sun, jade dew, hunting now for the means of imagining its own life, comprehending what it has become inside the girl.

  The Joshua tree discovers that it loves church! Plugging one’s knees into the p
urple risers, lifting to enter a song. The apple-red agony painted onto the cheeks of the sallow man. All the light that fills the church drifts dreamily over the Joshua tree, which stretches to its fullest extension inside the girl during the slow-crawling time of the service. It approves of this place, which resembles a massive seed hull. Deeply, extrapolating from its forays into the earth, it understands the architecture and the impulse. Craving stillness, these humans have evolved this stronghold.

  “How was it?” Andy asks, picking her up. He refused to go with her. Sundays are his day off. “Delicious God-bread? Lots of songs?”

  “It was nice. What are you so jealous about?”

  “Angie, you never said.”

  “Mmm?”

  “I didn’t know you were religious.”

  Her head bobs on the long stem of her neck, as if they were agreeing on a fascinating point.

  “Yes. There’s plenty we don’t know about each other.”

  I can still get out of this, he thinks. Without understanding exactly how the trap got sprung, he can feel its teeth in him.

  “You should come in next time,” she offers. “You’d like the windows.”

  “I can see the windows right now.”

  “You’d like being on our side of them.”

  Seed hull, the girl thinks, for no reason.

  * * *

  Sometimes, to earn extra money, she watches kids who are staying at the motel. Six dollars an hour, four dollars for each additional kid. She is good at it, mostly.

  Timmy Babson hates the babysitter. Sometimes her eyes are a dull, friendly brown and as kind as his sister’s; sometimes they are twin vacuums. This is already pretty scary. But tonight, when he looks over, he sees the bad light flooding into them. Not yellow, not green. An older color, which Timmy recognizes on sight but cannot name. And this is much worse.

  His own eyes prickle wetly. His blond hair darkens with sweat; pearls of water stand out on his smooth six-year-old forehead. The longer he stares back, the wider the gaze seems to get, like a grin. Her eyes radiate hard spines of heat, which drill into him. Timmy Babson feels punctured, “seen.”

  “Jane!” Timmy screams for his mother, calling for her by her first name for the first time. “Jane, Jane! It’s looking at me again!”

  * * *

  On her good days, Angie tries to battle the invader. She thinks she’s fighting against lethargy. She does jumping jacks in the motel courtyard, calls her best friend in Juneau from the motel pay phone, and anxiously tries to reminisce about their shitty high-school band. They sing an old song together, and she feels almost normal.

  But, increasingly, she finds herself powerless to resist the warmth that spreads through her chest, the midday paralysis, the hunger for something slow and deep and unnameable. Some maid has drawn the blackout curtains. One lightbulb dangles. The dark reminds Angie of packed earth, moisture. What she interprets as sprawling emotion is the Joshua tree. Here was its birth, in the sands of Black Rock Canyon. Here was its death, and its rebirth as a ghostly presence in the human. Couldn’t it perhaps Leap back into that older organism?

  The lightbulb pulses in time with Angie’s headache. It acquires a fetal glow, otherworldly.

  Home, home, home.

  Down, down, down.

  Her heels grind uselessly into the carpet. Her toes curl at the fibers. She stands in the quiet womb of the room, waiting for a signal from the root brain, the ancient network from which the invader has been exiled. She lifts her arms until they are fully extended, her fingers turned outward. Her ears prick up like sharp leaves, alert for moisture.

  She is still standing like that when Andy comes home with groceries at 10 p.m., her palms facing the droning lightbulb, so perfectly still that he yelps when he spots her.

  * * *

  How old such stories must be, legends of the bad romance between wandering humans and plants! How often these bad grafts must occur, and few people ever the wiser!

  In 1852, the Mormon settlers who gave the Joshua tree its name reported every variety of disturbance among their party after hikes through the sparse and fragrant forests of Death Valley. One elder sat on a rock at the forest’s edge and refused to move.

  Eighteen seventy-three, in the lawless town of Panamint City. Darwin in 1874; Modoc in 1875. During the silver boom dozens of miners went missing. Many leapt to their deaths down the shafts. The silver rush coincided with a pulse event: the trees blossomed unstoppably, wept pollen, and Leapt, eclipsing the minds of these poor humans, who stood no chance against the vegetable’s ancient spirit. Dying is one symptom of a bad graft. The invasive species coiled green around the silver miners’ brains.

  Eighteen seventy-nine: All towns abandoned. Sorted ore sat in wheelbarrows aboveground, winking emptily at the nearby Joshuas.

  In 1922, in what is now the southern region of the park, near the abandoned iron mines of Eagle Mountain, a man was killed by the human host of a Joshua tree. It was not difficult to find the murderer, since a girl was huddled a few feet from the warm body, sobbing quietly.

  “A crime of passion,” the young officer, who tended to take a romantic view of motives, murmured. The grizzled elder on the call with him had less to say about what drove anyone to do anything.

  All the girl could remember was the terrible, irremediable tension between wanting to be somewhere and wanting to be nowhere. And the plant, crazed by its proximity to rich familiar soil, tried repeatedly to Leap out of her. This caused her hand to lift, holding a long knife, and plummet earthward, rooting into the fleshy chest of her lover, feeling deeper and deeper for moisture.

  * * *

  The Joshua tree’s greatest victory over the couple comes four months into their stay: they sign a lease. A bungalow on the outskirts of the national park, with an outdoor shower and a fence to keep out the coyotes.

  When the shower water gets into their mouths, it tastes like poison. Strange reptiles hug the fence posts, like colorful olives on toothpicks. Andy squeezes Angie’s hand and returns the gaze of these tiny monsters; he feels strangely bashful as they bugle their throats at him. Four months into his desert sojourn, and he still doesn’t know the name of anything. Up close, the bungalow looks a lot like a shed. The bloated vowels of his signature on the landlord’s papers make him think of a large hand blurring underwater.

  Three Joshua trees grow right in their new backyard.

  Rent, before utilities, is four hundred dollars.

  “We can’t afford this,” he tells the girl, speaking less to her than to the quiet trees, wanting some court stenographer in the larger cosmos to record his protest.

  The landlord, who is a native of Yucca Valley, is taking the young couple through the calendar. His name is Desert John, and he offers these eastern kids what he calls Desert John’s Survival Tips. With laconic glee, he advises Andy to cut back the chaparral in their backyard to waist height in summer, to avoid the “minimal” danger of baby rattlesnakes. He tells Angie to hydrate “aggressively,” especially if she’s trying to get pregnant. (Angie starfishes a hand over her belly button and blanches; nobody has said anything to suggest this.) With polite horror, the couple nods along to stories of their predecessors, former tenants who collapsed from heat exhaustion, were bitten by every kind of snake and spider: “Fanged in the ankle and ass, I shit you not, kids. Beware the desert hammock.”

  Average annual rainfall: five inches. Eight-degree nights in December, one-hundred-and-twelve-degree July days. Andy is thinking of Angie’s face on the motel pillow. He calculates they’ve slept together maybe fourteen times in four months. In terms of survival strategies, in a country hostile to growth? These desert plants, so ostentatiously alive in the Mojave, have got zero on Andy.

  III. ESTABLISHMENT

  Once, and only once, the three of them achieve a perfect union.
>
  It takes some doing, but Andy finally succeeds in getting her out of the house.

  “It’s our anniversary,” he lies, since they never really picked a day.

  He’s taking Angie to Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, a frontier-themed dance hall frequented by bikers and artists and other jolly modern species of degenerates. It’s only six miles northeast of their new home and burns like a Roman candle against the immensity of the Mojave. Through surveying expeditions made in Jerry’s truck, Andy has delimited the boundary lines of Angie’s tolerance; once they move beyond a certain radius, she says that her head feels “green” and her bones begin to ache. Pain holds her here—that’s their shared impression. So when Andy parks the truck, they are both relieved to discover that she is smiling.

  The Joshua tree discovers that it loves to dance! Better even than church is the soft glow of the uneven dance floor. Swung around in strangers’ arms, Andy and Angie let themselves dance until they are sick, at the edge of the universe. Andy lets Angie buy him three shots of rum. A weather seizes them and blows them around—a weather you can order for a quarter, the jukebox song.

  It is a good night. Outside the dance hall, the parking lot is full of cars and trucks, empty of humans. The wind pushes into them, as hot as the blasts of air from a hand dryer. Angie draws Andy’s attention to the claret cup of the moon. “It looks red,” she says. And it does. Sitting on a stranger’s fender, listening to the dying strains of a pop song they both despise, Andy asks her softly, “What’s changed, Angie?”

  And when she doesn’t or can’t answer, he asks, “What’s changing now?”

  A question they like better, because at least its tense sounds more hopeful.

  The Joshua tree leafs out in her mind. Heat blankets her; for a moment she is sure she will faint. Her vision clears. “Bamboleo” plays inside the dance hall. Through the illuminated squares of its windows, they can see the waving wheat of the dancers’ upper bodies. Mouths gape in angry shock behind the frosted glass; they are only singing along to the music, Angie knows. Outside, the boy presses his mouth against hers. Now he is pressing every part of himself against the girl; inside her, his competitor presses back.