Gold Fame Citrus

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  What did it mean to have Ray back? All the anger she’d succored to starve her grief had boiled off upon seeing him, and she was not sure what would fill that space. She was waiting for it perhaps, weaving through the domes and shanties in their new constellations, looking for what would grow in her now that he’d made room.

  The bonfire was somber that night, musicless and sparsely attended. The fire itself was paltry, though Ig still grunted her wanting it, staggering toward the blaze in her light-ups and whining tragically when Luz picked her up. Luz was sad not to see Levi there, and her sadness revealed that she’d come looking for him. She could continue looking—she had seen the silhouette of his dome out on the edge of the colony—but knew she would not.

  Instead, she lingered on the periphery with Ig in her arms, gazing into the fire. Comparisons insisted. Ray’s crescent hip bones and Levi’s heaving, hair-damp chest. Ray’s flat feet and the cracked yellow callus where the two smallest toes on Levi’s right foot once were. Where Ray was riding waves, Levi was half-buried; where Ray was whisking along whitecaps, Levi was hunkered. Where Ray was leaning into the curves, Levi was arms outstretched. Where Ray was brittle grapevine, Levi was boulder. Where Ray was a liquid slug sluicing down the canyon, Levi was the Amargosa’s solid sandstone foot. She was drawn to Levi the way Ig was drawn to fire—she should fear him but did not. Meanwhile, going back to Ray was like rolling down a hill.

  —

  Once she’d touched Ray she’d not been able to stop. They sat on the floor of the Blue Bird, her silently stroking his bizarrely soft and white fingertips and speaking only to remind him to drink.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said finally. “I have to keep touching you until you’re alive again.”

  “I feel very much alive,” he said.

  “You look different,” she said, “but the same.” He was thinner, burnt, with new shading in his face, impossible to map. Bloody crescents where some fingernails had been. But he was hers: fine mouth and prophet eyes. Delivered her by some great benevolent hand. She could not deny that.

  “You look just like I remember,” he said. Though he was burnt all over he let Ig into his lap. He kissed the baby and burbled her stomach. She squealed and pinched her fingers together and Luz taught Ray how that meant more.

  All his months in Limbo Mine, months that had not passed in that out-of-time place, that had instead hovered, waiting, at the surface, that had shuddered behind him as he walked, came upon him then. Lost time flooded through him. His tears came—“I guess I’ve missed a lot”—and then hers. Luz asked where he had been, and through Ig’s demands and diversions he told her, told her everything, even all that was madness.

  When he described the attack the night before the rangers found him, she showed him the scarf she had stuffed into the cushion. “Here,” she said, stretching the wrinkled silk taut. “Levi brought me this.”

  “Yes,” he said, touching the rusty stain. “That must’ve been where they hit me.”

  “Who?” Luz asked, and Ig said, “Ooo, ooo, ooo.”

  Ray said, “I’m not sure.”

  Luz also gave him the Leatherman. He looked at it for a very long time. “This was my dad’s,” he said.

  “I didn’t know,” she said.

  He took her face in his hands and they both checked to see if she would allow this. She did, but his hands felt like a skeleton version of Levi’s and soon she pulled away. They were silent awhile before Luz said, “What do I look like to you?”

  Ray was confused. She added, “With your eye thing. What are you seeing now?”

  “It’s sort of pink in here, pink and yellow-orange. Sunset colors, a lovely sunset, and you’re like a happy purple cloud on the horizon.”

  “A happy cloud. And Ig?”

  Ig was luminous, with dark, hard feet. She was the same size as when he left her, but her head was larger, with spots larger than freckles sprayed along her hairline. “Sun spots. From the Melon.” He wept again as she told the story of their afterworld.

  Luz was quiet for some time. Her shimmer evaporated. She went dark as coal. “You left us,” she said finally.

  “I know. I’m—”

  “I mean, you left us to die.”

  “No, I . . . Yes. I was afraid. I convinced myself I was doing it for you, but it was for me.”

  “I fucking know that,” she said. “You’re not telling me any news.” She took a gash of root from her pocket and nibbled it ferociously. “Everything was like that.”

  “Everything?”

  “You were always convincing me I was a burden. That I needed taking care of. I felt like an infant at the end, and then you left me with one.”

  “I know, babygirl.”

  Luz croaked.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ray. “Habit. Goddamn it, I’m sorry.” He sobbed some, binding his hands with the stained scarf. Luz had been so small on Sal’s TV, smaller still as he’d come down from the dune sea. He’d known it was her immediately, folded into another man’s arms, as she always was. He wanted to be those arms, but knew he never had been and did not deserve to be now. And yet here he was, trying, and in this way he was as selfish as ever, more. Luz was maybe happy without him—no, he would not allow for that. When he touched her, she’d softened. She was his home, and he hers—he still believed that. Finally he said, “I needed you to need me, I see that now. I thought you were my project. I was so afraid, Luz, and I didn’t know how to love someone who didn’t need me. And you didn’t need me, and you don’t now. I know that . . . But, have me? Please have me. If you’ll have me I’ll deserve you.”

  Ig wedged herself between them and let loose a high, jealous hum. “She’s been doing this,” Luz said, though this was in fact the first time she’d seen it; until now she’d only heard about it from Dallas. “Remember that moan she used to do? It’s more like a hum now.” They waited for Ig to do it again, but Ig was nobody’s wag.

  Luz looked at Ray, found him repentant and tender and tired. She unwound the scarf from his hands and returned it to the cushion. “You need to sleep.”

  —

  Now, with Ig gone slack in her arms and the few people tending the dying bonfire giving her a wide berth, Luz wanted to take her own advice, wanted to sleep—but where? She remembered what the others said, about the dune curating, about being open to signs and omens. Why had she not accepted its grace sooner—why had she slid into her old stingy self?

  Levi’s dome summoned from the desert. Instead, she walked beyond the encampment, away from the dune sea. Among the sandy clumps of roots she came upon a downed tree, long dead, its branches burnt to nubs and its silvery trunk twisted like a hank of wet hair. Tomorrow someone from the colony would find it and hack it up for firewood. Everything she saw would go that way, someday.

  —

  Ray woke late that night, terrified. Luz and Ig were asleep beside him in the school bus, but from somewhere nearby came an atrocious and familiar yowl. He made his way outside and through the shanties and tents and RVs toward the strange banshee sound he’d learned to fear in the desert. At the edge of the colony, he found the source of that sickening shriek: a gangrenous-colored lorry, with roll bars and K.C. lights, Luz’s man and another tending to it.

  Rage rose in Ray like water in a basin. Luz’s man was big, his bigness the first and second and third thing you noticed about him. He had wide meaty hands and a beefy face that shone violently in the dawn. His buddy—weasely and quick, the kind of guy who noticed everything—said something to him and the bastard turned, saw Ray, and waved.

  You look just like I remember, Ray had told Luz, his only lie. Something was different about her, not just her darkened skin or wind-thinned hair or the sand all over her. Beneath all that, she was caved in, fervent. Manic but vacant. A little mad, maybe, or just saddled with a mighty hurt, Ray would have said if Sal or Uncle Randy as
ked after her. Suddenly it was clear that the big man was to blame not only for Ray’s injuries but Luz’s too.

  Ray waved back.

  Luz’s big man and his helper mounted the lorry and tore off into the dune sea.

  —

  Out beyond the colony, a formation of red, wind-rounded stones rose from the husks of chaparral. A few days later, when he was well enough, Ray invited Luz and Ig to accompany him to the formation.

  There, Luz found herself answering the questions she’d so often asked when she first arrived, found herself often saying the name so often said to her.

  Ray helped Ig summit a boulder. “Levi. He’s the dowser? The one Lonnie told us about? He runs this place?”

  “It’s so much more than that.”

  Her adoration cranked a vise on Ray’s chest. But he and Luz had spent that first night together, and the three nights since, and though she’d refused his advances, the nights themselves were something. He and Luz had doled out some pain to Levi in those hours.

  “He finds water,” she said.

  Ig hurled herself into Ray’s arms. He said, “Tell me about him.”

  Luz did, her voice shimmering with reverence, bristling with golden zeal. Ray heard it and also another, a gravelly voice from near memory. He saw in his mind a Sunday morning figure, intrepid and windblown on location, marching out the facts with steady indigo objectivity.

  He’s a scientist, a naturalist. But those words are so deficient. You know that sense we always had that we were missing something? That there was something fundamentally wrong in the way we approached the natural world? You said that, once. The Amargosa looks barren but it’s teeming with life. He’s the reason all these people are here. Why they came and why they stay. He keeps all of us alive. He finds water . . . ephemeral rivers, nearly instant . . . the equivalent of coral reefs. He’s . . . touched. You know I scoff at this as much as you do, but it’s true . . . He’s walked through some dark spaces to get where he is . . . learned to listen to the rocks and sand and earth . . . the uranium spoke to him. In a hundred years we’ll have a completely different understanding of the natural world, thanks to him. He’s like Darwin, or Lewis and Clark . . . a seismic shift in the way we understand the environment . . . blending of the spiritual and the natural. Everything’s connected and he can feel the strings. I feel drawn to him, I guess, since you’ve been gone . . . made me grow in ways I didn’t know I could. Tenderhearted . . . demanding . . . Yucca Mountain . . . Operation Glassjaw . . . A prophet, I guess you would say. It’s like the world is bigger because of him—he can see in a different way—like you! And he’s a giver like you—he gives himself to everyone here. You would like him, Ray.

  Citizens, I come to you today from the Mojave Desert. Behind me lies the Amargosa Dune Sea, the only known landmass of its kind, what geologists call a pseudo-spontaneous phenomenon, a superdune, a symbol of the drought that has wrecked the American West. It has collapsed agri-business as we know it, sending millions of refugees, known colloquially as Mojavs, fleeing the Southwest, desperately seeking shelter—and resources. It’s a landscape we all recognize, emblematic of a drama each of us is familiar with. But could this superdune be hiding a secret? . . . Some call him a dowser, some call him a visionary, others say he is a fugitive who may even have access to nuclear weapons . . . He is believed to have fled here, to the Amargosa Dune Sea, though how he might survive here remains a mystery . . . a whistle-blower to some, to others a disgruntled employee . . . accused of stealing state secrets . . . accused of polygamy . . . linked to the disappearance of a female coworker . . . train bombing in Albuquerque . . . extremist radical views . . . ransacking aid convoys . . . Sunday Java unearthed this exclusive photo in which we see the burnt frames of two lorries belonging to the Red Cross . . . Or is he, as some say, a prophet, possessed of a rare gift much needed in this barren, blighted wilderness? We cannot know until he is brought to justice. For now he remains . . . on the lam.

  Ray listened to them both. Luz was trying not to hurt him, he could tell, and he was trying to determine whether she was in love with this supposed dowser. When Luz told him she had something she wanted him to see, Ray followed her back to the bus, hoping whatever it was would prove she was not. A consolation he would be denied.

  She went to the glove compartment and handed him a notebook. Ray sat down and skimmed it. Luz hovered manic as a hummingbird as he paged through sketches and scrawl—a madman’s manifesto.

  As he read, Ray fingered the scar at his hairline. Everything’s connected, Luz had said, and it felt so then. It seemed he could wiggle the divot of waxy tissue on his forehead and a little bell would ring at the dowser’s bedside.

  Luz sat before him, her knees folded under her, expectant. “Isn’t it amazing?”

  Ray did not know how to begin. “What does that mean, babygirl? To ‘liberate’ a bunch of uranium?”

  “It’s a way of listening.”

  Ray scratched his chin.

  Luz said, “He found Ig and me that way. We’re supposed to be here.”

  “For what? Why?”

  “The Amargosa is a wasteland because they need it to be a wasteland, see? If Baby Dunn and her baby are here, thriving—”

  “Baby Dunn? What are you talking about?”

  “We disrupt that narrative. It’s about showing us as humans. A chosen people.”

  “You said you hated all that Baby Dunn shit.”

  “Me and Ig. Videos of us gardening, taking a bath. Make them think they discovered us.”

  “You and Ig? That’s insane. Don’t you realize what would happen if they saw you, her?”

  Luz stood up. “You’re not getting it. We’re the rallying cry.”

  Ray pressed his hands against his face then looked up at her. “Has he been taking Ig?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want him alone with her.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m trying to tell you how special this place is. It’s in danger. They could come any day. If we don’t do something.”

  Ray stood, holding up the primer. “Says Levi.”

  “We’re under assault here, Ray. I think I can help.”

  “Help how? Turning us in?”

  “You’re asking the wrong questions.”

  “What’s the most likely scenario here, Luz?”

  Luz shook her head, disappointed. “Why is it so difficult for you to believe that I could be useful here?”

  “I’m saying it doesn’t make sense.”

  “You’d think that with all that you’ve seen—are still seeing—you could open yourself to the unknown.”

  In fact, Ray’s visions were fading. Even now, as he watched Ig bobble around the bus, she was only faintly opal. Luz was a mute slate, and the light pressing on the blankets told him nothing. His heartcolors would be gone by sunset. Ray said, “I heard a story about him on the news, in Limbo Mine.”

  Luz scoffed. “The news.” She tossed the news out the bus window.

  “He’s a criminal.”

  “So are we.”

  “He’s a liar. A fraud.”

  “You don’t want to talk to me about liars and frauds,” she said.

  Ray was silent.

  “He finds water, Ray. You’ve been drinking it.”

  “He steals it, Luz.”

  “You don’t get it. It doesn’t matter what anyone says about him.”

  “He hijacks aid convoys. I saw photos of the aid convoys on fire. That’s where he gets the water.”

  “He wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Him and his guys cracked my fucking skull.”

  “No—”

  “He might have killed people, Luz! There’s a missing woman—”

  Luz said, “Why are you trying so hard to belittle what we have here?” She put something into her mouth.


  “What is that you keep chewing?”

  “It helps me breathe.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Goddamn it, Ray! You’re treating me like a fucking toy. After all this, I’m still a doll to you. It’s easier for you to imagine some criminal conspiracy than to think I could be useful.”

  “It’s not about you, Luz—it’s about him.”

  “I know it is! I thought you were dead, Ray.”

  “You’ve said that. And I’ve said I’m sorry.”

  “I will keep saying it until you understand exactly what it means. I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead because that’s what you wanted me to think.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I thought you were dead. Dead, Ray!”

  Ray hurled the primer to the far end of the bus. “And who told you I was? He did. He was the one on that lorry—the one who attacked me—”

  “Don’t.”

  “I’m fucking sure of it.”

  Ig was not crying—she was watching—but Luz went to her as though she were. She lifted Ig and held her. She had never been more a mother than when she opened the back door of the Blue Bird and in a voice fossilized with resolve told Ray, “You need to find another place to sleep.”

  Ray drifted through the colony. Where exactly did Luz expect him to go? He passed RVs with foil over all their windows, tents, the black hand of ash where a fire had been. He passed a man in a teepee, napping, his features obscured by sun and sand and fuchsia mottling like some new map across one side of his face. Ray walked in circles, and each time he passed the man Ray glanced at him. The sun relentless, he eventually lay in the teepee’s shrinking shadow and tried to sleep.

  When he woke the old man stood above him. “You were thrashing around,” he told Ray. “Shouting things.”

  “Was I?” Ray tried to blink the stains from the old man’s face, angered by the last remnants of the visions that had led him here, their whimsical obstruction.