by Jess Arndt
“Laundry, good idea, me too,” I said, dashing my name onto the credit card slip.
That night the walrus brought others. I woke similarly, with a pressure pounding against my gut. I stood to pee. My room was damp, Walri sprawled grotesquely on every surface. I sat back down, pulled the palm-tree-patterned cotton blanket up.
“Not a circle jerk but a circle twerk,” the king walrus said.
One week later a letter arrived in the mail. I sat at the table and sliced it open. The kitchen was dirtier now. My sleep kept me so busy I rarely had time to clean it. I shook the envelope. The contents slid out with a bump. Divorce papers. They said I had been married (or was still) to someone named CeCe Bardell. Bardell? Even that confused me—we must not have shared names, I guessed.
I returned to the FOE, a little reluctantly this time. A ten-foot-tall wooden eagle greeted me in the parking lot. I wanted to find out anything about my wife. Tamara was on
the computer, her long torso punching up and down as she typed.
I shoved the offending envelope in my pocket.
“Shredded beef enchiladas,” she said. It’s true, I only ordered one thing.
“Do you want to, uhmmm, get a beer tonight?”
As soon as I said it I began to sweat. My kitchen was full of takeout containers, my room was more like a dock house.
“Okay,” she said, clicking between screen after screen of what looked like chat rooms. “Why not.”
We took my car and drove back along the road. Here it turned dark at four-thirty so by five p.m. it was stygian night. I watched as my lights swished against the metal siding of the Saloon, the only nearby bar. We didn’t stop. My feet were locked—resisting any kind of braking action. My shoulders were rigid too. I had that feeling sometimes—I was one of those hibernating sculptures still waiting to be freed from
its rock.
In the passenger seat, Tamara was pulling at her ear, squeezing them back and forth.
“You can smoke in the car,” I said, whisking down her window. “Seriously!”
It reminded me of my neighbor, or he wasn’t my neighbor but my neighbor’s property manager. The houses closest to me on either side were empty but not boarded up. Gary was big and tan with gray feathers of chest hair. He drove a shiny energy saver and checked on things. At dawn when I let out the half-stray cat and rubbed my back against the badly tacked doorframe—Gary was out there smoking. Bomb days were best: the reds rawer, the pinks had more juice. Maybe that’s why he’d pointed his windshield west and was playing the car radio as the sun swirled up through the dust.
The pose seemed suicidal.
“’Sup, Gary,” I called. Sulfur drifted into my mouth. But he kept thick-necking over the steering wheel, either intentionally not turning around or no sound of mine actually came out.
Now I made a slightly too fast right onto Sherman Hoyt. The beams filled the road and against the pavement—miles of scrubby desert. Someone had starting doing wheelies out there and making huge circles with what sounded like, from my bed platform, their 4x4 trucks. When I first arrived I
had been terrified at the thought of a V6 or 8 pulling up in the night.
“This is it?” said Tamara.
The siding on my house was peeling from the constantly whipping sand and my landlord had left hunks of debris scattered all over the premises to cure. At first I had wanted to scour the structure’s exterior but now the bedsprings and defunct washing machine just looked like familiar shapes to move around.
“Yep,” I said.
“I used to buy weed here,” she said, unbending out of the car. She seemed suddenly cheerful. “Nice place.”
I unlocked the door, or pretended to. The lock was only about 30 percent functional. Still I went through the motions dutifully, as I had when I left the house. Then I turned on a few lights. But not too many, I didn’t want her to really look around. I cleared the small kitchen table and took out a six-pack of Sierra Nevada fresh from the Circle K.
“So what’s it like being a lesbian?” Tamara said, her legs extending practically inside the stove.
“Umm,” I said, hacking out the beer through my throat tubes.
“I mean yeah,” I said, “I’ve watched all the big films—Go Fish, All Over Me, what was it? That heroin one.”
She looked at me blankly. My neck burned.
“But otherwise, I’m not sure I’d really know?”
“Oh,” said Tamara, “huh.” She lit up from a Newport pack. “I just thought, I mean, for a guy, isn’t your Adam’s apple a little small?”
“I’ve also watched The L Word,” I offered. Pathetic episode after pathetic episode flashed up. “So I think all in all—yeah, it’s pretty good?”
But Tamara was on her knees yanking at a piece of plywood floor patch and it seemed like she was barely listening.
“They used to keep extra pot in here,” she said as she lifted the board. “Those assholes, but now it’s gone.”
Beer, I loved it. I opened another one. I gave myself little lobotomies every night just so I could sleep.
“Hey, should we get really fucking drunk?” I said.
The toilet was rushing. I went to jiggle it. I flicked the light switch. Nothing but more blackness—the way that blackness seemed to swell when you tried to amend it. I went out into the cramped hall and toggled that switch as well.
Blacker.
My head felt hazy but I was sober enough to remember that Tamara had gone home after six-pack number two. That we had only approached drunk. That she had started not only pulling at the floorboards but also prowling around the casings of the walls.
“Well-informed guesses!” she’d said.
But I’d become worried about the Walri—would they come? Wouldn’t they come? Would they share what we’d been doing?—and so I ushered her out.
I entered the den that also housed the only table and the kitchen. None of those switches worked either. The bungalow’s back windows stared toward what, in a thin string along the highway, was town. I lifted a dusty shade. Nothing punctured the dark for miles and miles. Even the stadium lights with their big sodium flares were dead.
I pushed on a flashlight. My divorce papers lay on the table with crazy faces—tongues sticking out and googly eyes—drawn over the back of them in Sharpie; “302-897-3356,” it also said.
Tamara answered immediately.
“Do you remember a guy who used to come into Las Palmas, about my height, black bangs, glasses?” I said. “A real painterly dude.”
“I guess so?” she said.
“Well did you like him? Don’t bother bullshitting!”
I flicked a switch up and down helplessly. No result.
“If you’re worried about this blackout,” she said, “it’s normal. The bases out here cut power whenever they want.”
Was I worried about the blackout? It hadn’t occurred to me. I had only wanted to call her to ask my burning question. Now it had been asked.
“Good night,” I said.
I slept but woke often to breathing. I knew it wasn’t mine and yet also no one was there. The sounds were heavy, lactation-like. As if moisture was being added to and then sucked from the room with a shop vac. I heard a tap-tapping on the window. I pulled back the sheet that acted as a curtain. No one. I lay my head back down.
Go back to sleep, I told my thoughts.
All the old tricks: the systematically drawing my mind toward everyone I had ever known so I could protect them with ad hoc language spells, the ticking off of sex partners as half my brain worked overtime batting away something uglier . . . I touched the front of my throat. Why had Tamara
said that?
The rapping again. This time harder. Please, I said.
But something more incredible was happening. I pushed my face up against the nonoperable window then walked trancelike to the door.
Rain, in the Mojave.
In the morning g
ullies were slicing into the drought-compacted sand and threatening slides. White foam washed over the road. There weren’t drains or gutters. Nothing seemed ready to absorb.
With fog on the Sierras, the landscape entered another dimension. The ridgelines I had come to know as fixed disappeared or traded with each other and when the sun smoked through they steamed like treeless Herzogian jungle plots.
Water. Even the air suddenly had weight—you had to enter it before you moved past.
There was a baked riverbed that ran by the back of my house. Once, feeling jammed-in indoors, I had walked along its packed floor. The bed bent south. A mile down I came to a huge trash bag. Don’t be a body, I said. I couldn’t help myself. Toeing it, my foot against the plastic made a fleshy thud. I knelt down and pulled at the bag’s edge. The muzzle of a large dog fell out. A husky maybe, or something part wolf. I imagined a highway hit-and-run, the dead stop, then guilty tracks back to do this. I tried to re-cover the open face but that seemed worse.
Now brown sludge trickled against the riverbed’s walls. The blackout and the rain were, I believed, connected.
I moved along the bungalow’s perimeter, looking at the pools of water. Athel pines brushed my neck, heavy and salty. Wetness stained their under-branches in splotches. I was standing near an outshed I had always considered a spider hole when Gary came by.
“You okay?” he said.
I jumped.
He joggled his plastic cup that I could only guess contained grape soda and a sizable dump of Everclear.
I moved away from a circle of rocks I had been staring at. They seemed placed intentionally, by guided hands. I believed in talismans, energy fields, alien skirts of light.
“Going to the VFW tonight?” he said.
Would Tamara be there? flashed before I could control it.
“Mmmm,” I said. “It’s?”
“Taco Wednesdays.”
Every week Gary came by to ask me and every week, I, or my passive body, declined.
“I’ll try,” I said.
The VFW was a bigger club than the FOE. With the bases so close by, wives or husbands of service members were
always looking for something to do. Sunday breakfasts, holiday raffles—the weekly tacos pulled everyone in, desert rat or commando, because the ground-beef-filled shells were only fifty cents each.
Dressing again, I felt self-conscious in the mirror. I tugged on my Vibram-treaded boots. Took them off. Shoved them back on. I wasn’t sure I liked mingling with the army crowd. Everyone had black wraparounds and a fresh don’t-fuck-with-me barbershop fade.
The light was dulling. I walked out to the carport. My car clicked to life. From my road, Utah Trail, I spun the wheel left. A hitchhiker stood there with a cardboard placard: “Tacos .” He was thumbing toward town. This way was only more desert. NO SERVICES FOR 100 MILES, said a sign—blurring from sudden green to pitch-black.
The road had an oily sheen but the rain had stopped. Black air hugged black desert and sometimes a low span of hill glowed. I’d just drive a little, I thought, before making my decision. Sometimes I did this—drove out. Each time I felt euphoric pushing away from home. Then I realized the road kept on going and going—that there was no natural end or climax. Always I’d pick an unremarkable place—a nothing shoulder, a tiny shack or caved-in mailbox as my turn-around point.
I pulled to the side. This was Wonder Valley, where nothing seemed to live at all. I pressed open the door. Big scraping sounds were moving across the bottom of the foothills. Carpet bombing at low altitudes. The wet desert smelled musty and like gas.
Taco night loomed. I dialed Tamara’s number into my cell without sending. So what about Tamara? Or, for that matter, CeCe Bardell?
I uncrumpled the divorce papers and tried to read them. It was dark and smoky. I could barely work out CeCe’s note through the marker stain of Tamara’s teenage-like digits. “Yes I’ve been fucking Tim. Ever since he came back from the desert. But how can you possibly blame me??? After all, YOUR . . .” I shoved the wad in the glove box and turned the car around, slowly accelerating. It had been this way all my life—a desperation I couldn’t extricate myself from. I hated being seen.
* * *
I blew through a stop sign, it didn’t matter, everyone did it. A sign emerged: entering . . . I was close to Sherman Hoyt, I could just as easily turn home. But as I passed my turnoff, my car jerked horribly, making a gross sack-like crunch.
I stopped in the middle of the lane. I was breathing loudly as if I’d been running. Whatever it had been was big.
I could barely get out of the car. I knew I should search around in the brush or roadside ditch. There’d been—at the last minute—a recognizable weight. I felt the reverberations in my body, how I felt the whole world there sometimes. My arm seemed welded, the door lock, locked. It was raining again. I could see at least that nothing was in front of my headlights. I reversed anyway, the car worked. I turned on my blinker and didn’t pull over again until the VFW.
“Hey,” said Tamara. She was wearing a fringe vest, she looked good.
“Blackout still going, huh?” I said.
They were running on giant generators; only that could account for the blaze of light.
But it was as if I couldn’t really focus. She was sitting with her hand on a guy from the FOE—he raised up his beer, shoved back his hat, did what people in his position did.
It barely mattered.
I knew about the bloodied body that would meet me at home. How I would hold him—still damp, rub his slabs of flesh, stare into his flat lids.
“Wouldn’t you sleep in water,” I said, to the table of them, “if you could?”
I was sore all over. I walked to the overfull line that butted the dinky kitchenette, nodding to all the Garys and their cups of Everclear on my way.
“Can I please have a taco,” I said.
Acknowledgments
There’s no way this book would be here without my family, who besides giving me the space and trust to do this, make conjuring other worlds feel possible. This book was made not apart from family, but because of it, in all its many shades.
Thank you to my grandmothers, who loved reading most. To my magic brother Thomas, who might be younger but is teaching me everything, including how to have a euphoric body. To my empathic and deep-seeing mom and undauntable dad, who themselves lead unexampled lives, and who let me be myself and love me for it. Always. To my Waldron family, especially “Special Lady” crew Sonja, Iris, + Avery. Also K Keller and Starla. And the small animals I know best: Wally, Beulah, and Lucha.
Thank you to Amy Sillman, for this transformative cover, and for making me more lumpen. To Susan Miller, whose genius perfectly joins the scatological and sacred. To my story incubator + therapist Jodi Panas, who I know will be reading this. To my heart guards, Lanka Tattersall and Lauryn Siegel. To Nicco Beretta, who among so many things, is writing an essential book. To Cole Snyder for a whole life of rescues. To Lynne Angel, above all, for getting it.
Thank you to my conspirators + inspirators: Corrine Fitzpatrick. Sara Marcus, Matt Longabucco, Dia Felix, Krystal Languell, Ann Stephenson, the Herrings en swarm, Justin Torres, Michelle Tea, Dorthe Nors, John Coletti, Diana Cage, Caroline Bergvall, Nicole Eisenman, Camille Roy, Amy Scholder, and to Christina Crosby—who’s right there underneath. To Laurie Weeks for the astral dust. To Lynne Tillman for telling me you have to love it. To Jason Daniel Schwartz for going there with me and farther.
Thank you to Maggie Nelson, for helping at every corner and curve—whose own writing is a beacon, and who without, this book wouldn’t have happened.
To my brilliant and intrepid editor, Julie Buntin—I’m so lucky your sense of things is joyous and porous enough to let this book slip in. Thank you especially for your steady hand, capacious trust, and every scrap of ornament we cut.
To Marya Spence for your sagacity and this beautiful risk.
To Andy
Hunter + Catapult—I can’t believe how cool you are. You continue to set a new bar with your intelligence and sight.
Thank you to Sara Jaffe, who did it with me, each step, forever reader and forever pal.
And to Litia Perta, you are in every beat of this. I love you. Thank you for the wildness of your knowing and for all of the unknowing still to come.
About the Author
Jess Arndt received her MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and was a 2013 Graywolf SLS Fellow and 2010 Fiction Fellow at the New York Foundation of the Arts. Her writing has appeared in Fence, Bomb, Aufgabe, Parkett, and Night Papers, and as an action text with the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual world tour. She is a co-founder of New Herring Press, and lives and works in Los Angeles.
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