The colony reconvened that evening, when someone swung a girthy branch of mesquite into a bomb casing pilfered from Travis Air Force Base, sending a gong throughout the settlement, a solemn series of oms that summoned all to bonfire.
Cody was scurrying about, feeding mall debris into the fire. He passed near them and squeezed Ig’s knee.
“Watch,” said Luz, and set Ig on the ground. Free, Ig tottered, her light-ups’ pink carnival beacons flashing underfoot.
“Wild!” said Cody. “You’re tricked out, Ig.”
Ig seemed not to notice, concentrated instead on running.
Luz spent some time hunched, chasing after Ig and redirecting her away from the fire. Ig had by now become a kind of mascot at the colony, and people Luz had never spoken to tutted Ig, Ig, Ig as the baby chugged by, lighting their faces with red siren lights. Jimmer smiled at the child from where he sat on a bench seat from a gutted van, whittling a stick. “Psychedelic,” was his assessment.
Ig wanted up, so Luz lifted her. Ig wanted down, so Luz put her down. Ig pulsed her two curled fists skyward, asking for milk, so Luz found Dallas.
“Relax,” said Dallas, encouraging Ig to latch. “We’re not going anywhere.”
A pretty girl made room for Luz on a log near the fire, where smoke whipped into her face. Smoke follows beauty, said Billy Dunn, wherever he was. She blinked the ash from her eyes and saw Levi, or a mirage of him, watching her. Thick arms, sturdy trunk, still. Planted, or rooted. But those metaphors were expired here and the word that came instead was embedded. Suddenly, Luz arrived at a simple and perplexing fact: in the few siesta hours since the carousel, she had missed him.
A gust swelled the fire and brought Luz Mojav stories. They seemed ridiculous to her now. That the well-shaped girl beside her was a park ranger’s bride-in-Christ. That Nico, sitting cross-legged on a papasan in the bed of a truck, fiddling with some electronic he’d rigged to life, had a desk at an institute somewhere, unreturned term papers in a drawer, two yellowed strips of glue on the wall where someone had pried his nameplate free. That Jimmer was one of the Needles Twelve, his lost boy the forgotten child of the Mojave. That she might smell the oil on him still. That she might find black smirks still under his fingernails. That Levi had refused to board the National Guard lorry with his wife and twin daughters.
Beside Luz, the pretty girl spoke. “I want to admit that I’ve been doubting,” she said, and the others went quiet. “In the past. And recently, even. I’ve been unsure of why we’re here.” Her voice wobbled. “I’m ashamed to say it but it’s true.”
Someone said, “It’s okay, Cass.”
Cass said, “In a way it was easier when I first felt pulled. There was clarity there. It was stark, undeniable. Plus I had nowhere else to go.”
Many laughed.
“But being here is different, not so clear. I get a now-what feeling sometimes. I don’t know, maybe it’s easier to be lost than found. At least there’s energy in lostness. Something to be done. I know we’re supposed to trust the place, to embrace its mystery, to keep our eyes open, and I try to do that. I do. I try to be a vessel. It’s hard though, hard not to wonder what we’re supposed to be looking for. But today I knew. Today I was a vessel filled. It’s true—if we’re open and honest we will be consoled. I was.”
Nods all around.
“I want to offer my gratitude for that, and to tell anyone who’s feeling that now-what feeling to hang in there. To stay open, honest, willing. Like Levi says, we can’t force wonders. Can’t insist on signs. But they do come.” Here, she looked at Luz. “And when they do you can’t miss it.”
How lovely Cass looked, pliant and bare. Luz envied her. The Amargosa curates, Dallas had said. Spiritual was Lonnie’s word—the memory brought Luz old shame from new sources: how she’d scoffed at the very idea, the well-trod path her mind inevitably strolled, a straight line downhill to cynicism and disdain. She wished Ray were here, to buoy her with his capacity for belief. The world had been wider with him in it. She looked again to Levi, who could hear the earth. He seemed to want something from her.
“I’ve never really been a part of anything,” Luz said, without knowing why except it felt right. “Or, anything I could believe in. I guess what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is that idea, belief.” Some nodded. “I haven’t ever had a believer’s disposition. But lately I’ve been getting comfortable with the idea of something bigger than myself—I don’t want to say ‘God.’ When I was growing up people around me used that word in all the wrong ways. It was a weapon, that word. ‘God’s love’ was this scrap everyone was fighting for, something you could win by dressing with modesty and having a clean face, by sitting quietly. But why should those people and their fucked-up nonsense have anything to do with my experience, is what I’ve been thinking lately. Can’t I decide who I am? I’ve never been a very good listener, but today I felt I could be.”
Many nods.
“I know what you mean,” Luz said to Cass. “About it being harder to be found. It’s like there’s been this momentum carrying me forward, this energy, and I wasn’t sure where it was taking me. Scary, that feeling.” Several moaned their assent, urging Luz on. “But freeing, too. In a way. And now . . . I don’t know. A lot of it hasn’t made any sense. Or maybe it makes too much sense? I don’t have a lot of experience with clarity or . . . significance, I guess you’d say. I’ve never been good at it . . .” Her voice went wet with emotion and Cass patted her shoulder.
She went on. “You can’t see that from the outside, how frightening it can be to believe. Believers always seem so serene. I’ve never felt serene a day in my life.” Some laughs. “But I think maybe it’s been taking me here, that energy. I don’t know if that makes sense. Does anyone else feel this way? Maybe it’s just me . . .”
“No,” said Levi. “We all feel all of that every day. You are supposed to be here, Luz.” He went on. His words had a way of making the complicated comforting, making the listeners’ abundant fears instead evidence of sensitivity and keenness. He somehow unearthed confidence and serenity from deep wells of fatigue, revealed the sublime subtext in the long list of civilization’s failures. He brought, as he spoke, a verdant world to them—transformed the colony from a place of isolation and hardship to a place of beauty and abundant blessings. He invited the yuccas to lift their tired heads, regrew the wild grasses, reran the rivers, cleansed them of their saline and fertilizer and choking algae, replenished aquifers and refilled swimming pools, plucked the woodworms and emerald ash borers from the trees, rid the forests of their malignant fungi, swelled the snowpack, resurrected the glaciers, refroze the tundra, returned the seas to their perfect levels. It seemed possible, as he spoke, that his words might summon thunderheads, that his voice might bring rain.
—
Levi was human again beneath the sun of suns, his head draped in cloth, though Luz saw that his eyes had the same electricity as she offered her hand to help him up through the open back door of the Blue Bird.
Inside, he nodded to Dallas. “Give us a minute, would you?”
Dallas plucked her nipple from Ig’s mouth and went without a word.
“I brought you these,” he said to Luz, and offered a plastic shopping tote gone matte with dust. Inside the bag, Sacajawea, John Muir, Lewis and Clark, Mulholland and John Wesley Powell.
Luz accepted the bag. “You had these?”
“I saved them. Only things of value, so far as I could tell. Car was completely useless. Stylish, but suicidal.”
Luz lowered her head. Strange to see her books here, as though people from her past were visiting her, assessing her new life. She did not want to open them; to open them would be to open herself to their scrutiny. She put them down on her cushion nest.
“This too.” Levi offered her the hatbox filled with money.
“I don’t want that,” she said.
&nb
sp; He set it in the corner. “Dallas is taking good care of you?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re comfortable here.”
“Yes.” They were saying these things but meaning others, it seemed.
He said, “I wanted to thank you for sharing last night. And for finding the outlet mall, of course.”
Luz said, “Thank you. For the carousel.”
“I wasn’t sure if you—”
Ig interrupted. “What is?”
“Levi,” said Luz, lifting Ig and pointing.
“Eev-ai.”
“Lee-vi,” Luz corrected. But Ig was through with the elocution lesson and instead thrust herself into Levi’s arms. He caught her. He had held a baby before, apparently. “Ig, Ig, Ig,” she chugged, milling her pelvis on his forearm. They laughed. Ig moaned then as though hurt by their laughter—perhaps she was—and rubbed her bloated head against Levi’s chest. It was a new gesture for her.
“She’s never done that before,” said Luz. “That’s the first time. It’s wild how quickly she changes. The minute I know what to do with her she morphs.”
“A changeling.”
“It’s maddening. Sometimes I think it’s making me crazy.” Ig continued waxing Levi’s pectoral with her forehead. “She’s a feeler,” Luz added.
Levi rubbed her back. “I can relate.”
They watched her a little more—she gifted Levi one of her sinking stones and then cried for its return. “How old is she?” asked Levi.
“Two.”
“Small for two.”
“Almost two.”
They looked at the books where they lay on her bed, beneath the window, so Sacajawea and Little Pomp stared up at Ray’s Leatherman. Beneath them John Muir, who had comforted her the day Ray impaled the prairie dog, on the last day of what had passed for normal then. These artifacts from the mansion seemed to confirm Luz’s bonfire inkling: inevitable that a little creature would dart into the starlet’s foyer as Luz was playing dress-up. Impossible that Ray might do anything other than skewer it with the fireplace poker. They had to get to Ig, to the colony, through whatever maze of carnage and threat necessary, through gopher and raindance and daddy-o. Through the Nut; somehow she had not thought of him in a long time.
Luz took Ig from Levi and set her down. “Can I ask you something?”
Levi nodded. “Of course.”
Ig wanted up again, but Luz ignored her. “You said you find a lot of bodies out there.”
“Yes.”
Ig pinched her ten fingertips together, meaning more. But Luz went on. “How often do you find people alive?”
Without hesitation he said, “You’re the first. You two.”
“How? How did you find us?”
“You may not believe me if I tell you.”
“Try. Please.”
More, signed Ig.
Levi hesitated.
“How did you find us? Did you hear something? That . . . voice?”
His head tweaked up.
“You did.” More.
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
Levi said, “There was a bighorn. They’re supposedly extinct. I tracked it.”
“I saw. In the sulfur lake. It was dead.”
“Yes. I followed its death rattle, you might say.”
Luz lifted Ig finally and stroked her great head. “Last night you said you think we’re supposed to be here. Ig and me.”
Levi looked to her as though he’d just been resuscitated. “I do. You are.”
“Why?”
“I heard that voice. It wasn’t just the bighorn dying. An alarm of sorts. It said we needed you.”
“Me?”
“It was a sense that someone important was fading from this place.”
“Important how?”
He reached down for Sacajawea and moved her aside. He lifted John Muir and opened him. Luz wanted to reach out and stop him, to protect the Blue Bird from the starlet’s library, to keep this chimeric colony as far as possible from the laurelless canyon. But from John Muir Levi withdrew a manila envelope, and from the envelope, a piece of paper, creased and bluish. “I knew I knew you,” he said, handing her her own birth certificate.
She said nothing. Ig batted at the paper.
“I remember that photo of you, on the soccer field,” Levi said.
“‘Field’ is generous.”
“I remember the caption. ‘Baby Dunn at a California Soccer Clinic.’ The picture was all over the news when I was in college. We did a unit on you in my English class. ‘Visual Rhetoric in Politics.’” He laughed. “Can you believe it? That’s what we were doing then. Making posters. I wrote a paper about you. ‘Angelic Symbols in the Secular Media’ or something. I said the picture was persuasive because you looked like you were about to cry.”
“I wasn’t about to cry.”
“The way you were clutching the ball, confronting the camera.”
“My mom was yelling at the paparazzi. I was trying to stop her.”
“I got an A.”
“She was yelling in Spanish and I was embarrassed.”
Then, Dallas reentered the Blue Bird.
Levi took a barely perceptible step away from Luz. “Come see me sometime, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m in the dome.”
“I know.”
“Come soon.”
If she went, she would have to leave Ig, which she had not done since Levi had taken her to the place where Ray’s body was interred and which she did not want to do ever again. If she went she would have to ignore that instinct and ask Dallas to watch Ig. She would have to tell Dallas where she was going, which she did not want to do though she did not know why, exactly. If she went she would have to go after bonfire, when Ig was sleeping, but before Levi went out dowsing. If she went she would have to lie to Dallas, to say, I think I’ll take a walk, and she would have to endure Dallas’s mysterious disappointment anyway. If she went she could take Sacajawea and John Muir, to remind her who she was. If she went without them she might find out. If she went she would go as Baby Dunn, little changeling. If she went she would know what he knew, and would thereafter be a better listener, would perhaps look inward with his same sureness and serenity. If she went she would run her hands along the patchwork cloth of his geodesic dome, a place she had walked by many times before she realized the others did not walk by it, it was a place circumvented out of deference, a place whose entrance and exit were not immediately evident. If she went she would pause to look up at the night sky and see it blighted by stars, their glow radiating from the dune, their moon. If she went she would have to call out to him in the dunelight, but if she went it could not be a call but a whisper, which would be stolen by the wind. If she went she would whisper again, pressing her hands into the canvas coverings, run them along the spines of triangles upon which the whole structure rested. If she went she would feel something pressing back, like a child stretching in the womb, and she would recoil and feel for Ig where the baby did not hang from her. If she went she would marshal her courage and reach for that which was reaching for her. If she went she would feel a hand through the canvas, and pause there knowing it was his. If she went a geometry of darkness would open in the blankets and his voice, bodiless, soft as sand, would beckon her inside. If she went she would smell sleep must and dried sage. If she went they would stand together beneath the patchwork canopy of blankets. If she went there would be a small fire pit dug at the center, with faint coals like flotsam swaying in the bottom and all the colors of the blankets would be above them and feathers would be hanging from the rafters, feathers and little bones and bound clusters of herbs and pecks of a mottled golden root. If she went he would ask her to sit. If she went he would offer her some root to chew, and if she went she would take it
and they would sit side by side on his bed, a Red Cross cot, and he would teach her how to knead the root in her molars, releasing its fusty juice, to swish the juice around in her mouth before sending it into a ration cola spittoon. If she went she would get used to the root’s fustiness and it would give way to an earthy oolong flavor and the softest sensation of floating. If she went he would say, I don’t use that word, dowser. It’s a gift I have. You’ve probably heard that the summit is permafrost year-round? It’s not. There’s a cycle of thaw and freeze, but it’s incredibly rapid. The rivers appear for a half an hour, often less. A pattern more felt than known is the best I can describe it. There are trends conventional methodology cannot reveal. Processes we have yet to catalog within our cosmology. Undocumented happenings beget themselves, if you follow me. Imagine a super-speed evolutionary time warp. It’s not unprecedented. You’ve heard of Calico? The Early Man site? Do you know what they found there? If she went he would list them—camel, horse, mammoth, saber-tooth cat, dire wolf, short-faced bear, coyote, flamingo, pelican, eagle, swan, goose, mallard duck, ruddy duck, canvasback duck, double-crested cormorant, grebe, crane, seagull, stork—and she would see each hovering above the coals. If she went he would say, Those are just the fossils. The Amargosa has been categorized as a wasteland. Inhospitable, they say, as though nature should offer you a cup of tea and a snack. Barren. Bleak. Empty—my favorite. Nearly every species that once inhabited the Mojave Desert has purportedly been erased from this area. It has been described as the deadest place on the planet. But these so-called surveys have been conducted over a mere fraction of the dune sea. The University of Michigan surveyed two percent, BLM only one. The Fish and Game study, the most widely cited paper on the Amargosa—the one that named it the Amargosa—looked at point-oh-oh-one percent of the total area. Studies have been conducted over shockingly short periods of time—a week, ten days. They don’t like to get dust in their eyes. The Harvard study spent more time describing the team’s dry skin than biodiversity. No serious rigorous survey of the flora and fauna of the Amargosa Dune Sea exists.
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