Nevada Days

by Bernardo Atxaga

  The record began to play. I immediately felt good. The song was “Summertime”: “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy, fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high, oh yo’ daddy’s rich and yo’ ma is good lookin’, so hush, little baby, don’t you cry …” The song was even sweeter than the silence. And this was a version I had never heard before.

  I had been in Nevada for about two months, but like someone going into a house simply to deliver a message and leaving the front door open on the assumption that he won’t be staying, I didn’t feel I really belonged. This changed when I heard that music. Just as Dominique Laxalt had said of Basque shepherds and the desert, my mind turned a corner, I became an inhabitant; I closed the door. “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy, fish are jumpin’ …” It wasn’t summertime, and there were no fish in the campus lake. There weren’t even any swans to be seen. But that music, that song lent Nevada a pleasant lightness and suddenly it didn’t seem so very difficult to live there.

  The man with the ponytail handed me the record cover, which showed the members of a family, each holding his particular instrument: guitar, double bass, banjo and violin. The name of the record was “Elementary Doctor Watson!”.

  “Doctor Watson?”

  “Traditional American music,” the man said.

  The vinyl records weren’t for sale. I bought several old postcards and a second-hand guide that contained maps of various areas of Nevada and the whole of the West. It cost me fourteen dollars for the lot.

  SEXUAL ASSAULT

  We were subscribers to the Reno Gazette-Journal, and a copy was delivered to us every day at half past four in the morning. The delivery guy arrived in a white Toyota and tiptoed to the door so as not to disturb the silence. The vehicle must have been specially adapted, because the engine purred, and the noise the doors made when they closed was no louder than the sound of the newspaper landing on the porch.

  On October 22, I was awake when the white Toyota came to call, because the dream-catcher that Izaskun and Sara had bought me at Pyramid Lake wasn’t working and I was still sleeping badly. At a quarter to five, I was already sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the newspaper. The garden was deserted, as it had been for the last few weeks. No sign of the raccoon.

  On the page reporting local news was an article headlined “Sexual assault”. The attempted rape of a university student in somewhere called the Whalen Parking Complex. I turned on my computer and studied a map of the city. The car park was on campus, less than two hundred yards from our house.

  Three hours later, Ángela and I went to the university and were astonished at how normal everything seemed. There were no policemen in sight, no huddled groups of students, no cuttings from the newspaper on the noticeboard in the library. When we went up to the C.B.S., no-one said anything, not even Mary Lore. At the coffee stall, I met a French teacher who had the office next to ours, and I mentioned what I had read. She was surprised. No-one had said a word about it.

  At the entrance to the library, there was always a big pile of copies of the New York Times, which, thanks to a benefactor, teachers and students could pick up to find out what was happening in the fifth or sixth circle of reality – the government crisis in Russia, the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan, U2’s latest tour – or to read comments on these events by the seventh circle. On the other hand, they didn’t read the Reno Gazette-Journal, they didn’t buy it. For economic reasons, of course – the monetary unit on most campuses is the cent – but also, above all, because of a kind of tropism. Someone preoccupied with what is happening in the fifth or sixth circle finds it hard to lower his gaze and notice what is going on around him in the first circle.

  There was no message from the campus police on my computer. They probably didn’t have much to say. Their headquarters was in a building facing the Whalen Parking Complex, where the attempted rape had taken place.

  FAREWELL TO STEVE FOSSETT

  Two months after Steve Fossett’s disappearance in the desert, and when there was still no sign of him, the news programmes on radio and television issued a bulletin announcing that all search operations were to be halted. No more planes or helicopters would scour the desert, no more search parties would tramp the mountains.

  The bulletin only confirmed what most people thought, namely, that the chances of finding the “American hero” alive were zero. Richard Branson, owner of Virgin, said his farewell in Time magazine:

  “I first met Steve Fossett on a freezing January evening at the Busch stadium in St. Louis, Mo., in 1997. He was about to attempt a solo circumnavigation of the world by balloon, and although we were rivals, I decided to see him off in the spirit of sportsmanship that still inhabits the world of record-breaking. As I neared his balloon, a television crew approached, and I found myself being filmed chatting with a man I thought was on his team. I said one had to be a bit mad to test oneself in this way. The quiet American in front of me looked at me sympathetically and said: ‘I’m Steve Fossett.’”

  Richard Branson added that their friendship had begun right then, and that the number of world records Steve Fossett had accumulated over a period of twenty-two years – one hundred and sixteen in total, more than anyone else in history – was truly admirable. His circumnavigation in the carbon-composite jet, the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, flying at altitudes of fifty thousand feet for three and a half days, alone and without rest, had been one of his most amazing achievements, and, given what it taught us about saving fuel, possibly one of the most beneficial too.

  At the end of the article, along with some sad words of farewell – “It’s hard having to say goodbye to a true American hero” – Richard Branson described Steve Fossett’s final project: to beat the land speed record by driving his Sonic Arrow at more than 800 miles an hour. Indeed, on the day of his final flight, he may well have been looking for alternative sites for this attempt.

  I looked on the Internet to learn more about Steve Fossett’s final project, and found a forum discussing precisely that. Most of the participants rejected the official version out of hand and refused to believe that he had disappeared or that he was dead. In their view, the accident was merely a publicity stunt. The problem was that, despite all his amazing world records, Steve Fossett was far from being a star in the United States, mostly because he was middle-aged and slightly chubby. And because he wasn’t handsome and sexy like Richard Branson, he needed something extra, a mystery that would ensure him plenty of publicity on the eve of his attempt to beat the world land speed record. In short, there was no need to worry. Fossett wasn’t dead, he was merely hiding. He would reappear at any moment beside his Sonic Arrow, wearing his trademark astronaut outfit and giving a V-for-victory sign.

  Almost everyone taking part in the forum was merely hypothesising and, generally speaking, did not seem quite right in the head. One of them, though, signing himself ‘Snowflake’, offered what seemed to be some more reliable facts. The best proof that Steve Fossett was dead, he said, was what had happened to the project since. The vehicle was up for sale. The people selling it were asking three million dollars for the project and the vehicle, which was way below the nearly four million dollars that the project had cost so far.

  Snowflake concluded by giving still more concrete information: “Official photographs of the vehicle will be taken in the last week of October at the salt lake bed where they had been planning to do the test run, and will be published in the second week of November, giving full details of the machine.”

  I called Bob Earle from my office and told him what I had just read. Ever since our trip into the desert, Steve Fossett had become one of our regular topics of conversation.

  “It’s nearly the end of October already,” he said, when I told him what Snowflake had said.

  “There was no mention of the name of the salt lake bed where Fossett was thinking of carrying out the test,” I said.

  “Give me ten minutes. I’ll call you right back.”

  Less than e
ight minutes later, the telephone rang.

  “The vehicle will be in the Black Rock Desert this weekend. They’re going to take photographs of the Sonic Arrow,” he told me. “This is reliable information. A friend at the town hall told me, and he only deals in twenty-four-carat gold.”

  We decided to go. It would be quite a long drive, but it wasn’t every day you had the chance to see a vehicle that could travel at more than 800 miles an hour.

  “I think Izaskun and Sara might like to come too,” Earle said.

  “We’ll all go, then, the whole family. And what about Dennis? Do you think he’d be interested?”

  “I’ll ask him. He’ll find it hard to be apart from his spider, but I think he’ll come.”

  “Is the spider still alive?”

  “Well, I’m certainly not going to go sticking my finger in that bottle.”

  We agreed that we would set off on Sunday. He would pick us up in College Drive at eight in the morning.

  IN SEARCH OF THE SONIC ARROW

  Black Rock was in a remote part of the desert, quite some way beyond Pyramid Lake, and, as Earle said, you’d have to be an insomniac not to drop off at the wheel on the journey. However, the atmosphere in the car was very lively, and even I managed not to succumb to sleep. There were six of us: Earle and Ángela in front, with me in the middle row; and in the back seat, playing with a laptop, Sara, Izaskun and Dennis.

  “We’re nearly there,” Earle said.

  Whitish depressions, small dried-up salt lakes, began to appear on one side of the road. They looked like ulcers.

  We drove another eight or so miles, and the ulcers grew larger. On the other side of the road was what looked like a wall of rocks.

  Conversation in the Chevrolet Avalanche revolved around Steve Fossett. It was paradoxical that a man capable of surviving all those dangers and breaking 116 world records should die like that, in a little plane.

  “He was flying a Citabria,” Dennis said. “I wouldn’t call that ‘a little plane’.”

  “What seems odd to me is that the search should have taken so long,” I said. “The longest you can survive in the desert is three days, isn’t it?”

  Earle looked at me in the rear-view mirror.

  “And another question,” he said. “Who’s paying for it all?”

  On the Internet, Dennis had found photographs of various racing cars that had set land speed records in the past, and he was showing them to Izaskun and Sara: “This one is the Bluebird. And this is the Spirit of America. And this is the last one to beat the record, Thrust …”

  I remembered the Bluebird as soon as I heard its name. It was there in my memory as clearly as when I first saw it fifty years ago in the magazine my mother used to read at the time, Reader’s Digest. It was similar to the cars that used to compete in Monaco, but about six feet longer.

  The threads of my thoughts easily found other issues of Reader’s Digest, and I remembered a story that had appeared in one of them. It took place on an ocean liner travelling from the United States to Europe and described an altercation that took place between an Indian entertainer on board ship and one of the passengers. The passenger mocked the Indian, saying that he had obviously removed all the venom from the snake he used in his performances, thus rendering it completely harmless. The Indian entertainer insisted he was wrong. The story ended tragically. The writer was Somerset Maugham.

  The road began to skirt round a white plain. In the distance, blocking the view ahead, was the top of a mountain.

  “Black Rock,” Earle said, pointing.

  A roadside bar appeared. It was a rectangular box about fifty feet long with very small windows and an adobe roof, and even more run-down than the Crosby Bar at Pyramid Lake. Two Harley-Davidsons were parked to one side under a carport.

  “It’s not very elegant, but it will probably have the basics,” Earle said.

  Dennis was handing round pairs of dark glasses for when we eventually reached the white plain.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” Earle said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I followed him as far as the bar, which was so dark that I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to the contrast between the fierce light outside and the darkness inside. My ears, though, needed no period of adjustment to recognise the song coming out of the loudspeakers. It was “Rockin’ in the Free World” by Neil Young.

  The two Harley-Davidson riders and the barman were drinking beer at one end of the bar. The walls were almost completely bare apart from a six-foot-by-one photograph on the wall facing the entrance: a racing car. I copied down the information in my notebook: “Black Rock Desert, 15 October, 1997, Andy Green, ThrustSSC, 763.035 m.p.h.” It was a monster of a car. A black needle with two protuberances, two huge turbo engines.

  763.035 m.p.h. That was the record Steve Fossett had wanted to break with his Sonic Arrow. I imagined the pilot after the accident, lying in some remote place in the mountains or the desert and repeating with his dying breath: 763.035 m.p.h., 763.035 m.p.h.… I imagined, too, a couple of climbers crouching beside him, both wondering: “What does he mean? What mystery lies behind that number?” I brushed the thought away like a fly.

  Earle returned from the bathroom and we ordered two beers. The barman held up the bottles that he and the motorcyclists were drinking. It was a brand I had never seen before: Sierra Nevada.

  “Is that O.K. with you?” Earle asked me.

  “Fine.”

  “We’re here because of something we read the other day,” Earle said to the barman when he came back with the beers. “Can I just run it past you?”

  The man beckoned him over to where the two motorcyclists were standing.

  The loudspeakers were now blasting out Neil Young’s “Love and War”. But which was better, the quiet Crosby Bar or here? It was hard to say.

  There was another sign next to the photograph. “The first vehicle to break the sound barrier.” I thought back to my physics classes at Colegio La Salle. What was the speed of sound? I couldn’t remember. The threads of my thoughts couldn’t reach that far back.

  Earle went over to the door, telling the barman we would be back in an hour.

  “I’ll be here,” the man said. The two motorcyclists raised their hands in farewell.

  Outside, the sun filled everything, brazenly occupying the space between earth and sky. Dennis, Ángela, Izaskun and Sara were all wearing their dark glasses as well as caps advertising some I.T. company. Earle and I were in agreement: we would wear the dark glasses, but not the caps. There was no need, since we would not be getting out of the car on the drive through the Black Rock Desert.

  “I think we’re going to be in luck,” Earle said as we set off. “According to the barman, a huge truck arrived at the salt lake yesterday. I may be wrong, but I reckon the Sonic Arrow was inside that truck.”

  “Where’s the entrance?” Ángela asked.

  “There is no official entrance,” Dennis said from the back seat. “It’s not like a national park.”

  We followed the road for another mile or so, then, turning to the right, drove another mile off-road. We were on the shore of the salt lake.

  “Let’s go driving!” Earle said, putting his foot down on the accelerator.

  We were travelling at sixty miles an hour over that white surface, and everything around was ablaze with light. I tried to make out something through the window, but all I could see was whiteness, the sun bouncing off the salt bed, a kind of blinding white mist.

  According to Dennis, it was the custom in the desert for the driver to let go of the steering wheel or to allow a child to drive. He suggested to Earle that he let Izaskun and Sara drive for a minute, but Earle didn’t hear him. He was hunched over the wheel, looking to right and left. There was nothing to be seen, only whiteness upon whiteness. Then, for an instant, the mountain that gave its name to the place, Black Rock, appeared in the distance.

  I took off my dark glasses and immediately had to close my eyes. If,
in a normal desert, you could only survive without water for three days, what hope would we have in the Black Rock Desert? The threads of my thoughts started making troubling associations. I felt nervous.

  “No, this isn’t right!” Earle yelled. He seemed annoyed. “There’s no way they would have brought the car this far! All they want is a few photographs!”

  He slewed the car round 180 degrees without braking. The car tilted slightly to one side.

  “Slow down, Earle,” I said. “We don’t want the car to overturn.”

  “O.K.,” he said, braking slightly.

  Ahead of us lay a blue lake. Izaskun and Sara both started yelling with excitement.

  “There’s no water in that lake,” Dennis said. “It’s a mirage.”

  Earle was looking all around him, this time with Ángela’s help. We were once again travelling at sixty miles an hour.

  “There’s something over there,” Izaskun said from the back seat. She spoke unemphatically, as if what she said was of no importance.

  “Where?” we all asked at once.

  She pointed. On the white plain was an equally white shape, except that it was more geometric, more solid. As we approached, I thought – not very intelligently – that it was a rectangular panel, part of some kind of solar energy plant. It wasn’t. It was a trailer truck. Some men were moving around nearby. They were wearing overalls and red caps.

  “They’ve probably already put it back in the trailer!” Earle said. He was feeling very tense, as was Ángela. Dennis, Izaskun and Sara sat up in their seats.

  I did not share their excitement. The threads of my thoughts wanted to disconnect from it all. I was tired of chasing after the Sonic Arrow. I wanted to leave the Black Rock Desert.

  And yet, when we saw it, the car was amazing. It was parked in a corner formed by the trailer and a pickup truck, and seemed to be watching us, as if it were not a machine, but a bird or an insect come from some unknown planet. It was white, with a green-and-yellow stripe along each flank, and two short wings at the back sticking out at right angles.