by Melanie Tem
He cried out. He’d marred his diamond past all hope. He’d actually extended and connected the scratches so that now they covered almost the entire surface of the stone. Tendrils curled and twisted. The layered center, where he’d always suspected the hurt had started, had been layered even more.
Then he saw that it was a flower. The most beautiful flower he had ever seen.
LOST
Frank didn’t know the date he arrived in Los Perdidos, or even the day of the week, not having paid attention to such things for some time. Couldn’t have told you who his congressman was, either, or what he himself had had for breakfast that morning, though chips and Coke would have been a safe bet, depending on what you called breakfast, what counted as morning; Frank was just as likely to nap at high noon and be driving and snacking when the sun came up, having more or less deliberately lost conventional demarcations of a day or a night.
The ancient Dodge decided for him where he would stop; he made a point of having no opinion. Just over the New Mexico line, he lost two hubcaps virtually simultaneously, and chuckled and cursed at how things had a habit of disappearing from his life. When he got out to check, he saw he’d lost a lug nut, too, which made him laugh out loud, though without much mirth. He doubted he had much mirth in him anymore, if he ever had.
He’d never been out west before, knew it only from movies and gaudy paperbacks his dad had left him in a battered suitcase. He’d been amazed and amused to discover that the desert was exactly what he’d been led to expect: growth and destruction masquerading as nothing. From the books and movies, Frank knew to look under the surface, to take in the broader picture, and he found what he’d known he’d find. Endless sky. Marks of heat and cold, drought and flash flood, perfectly plain to anyone who knew what they signified. Eyefuls of land and then some, land that wore down whatever humans could put in it—cars, wagon wheels, arcane farm machinery, rotting fence posts and rusting barbed wire spiraling into nothing. Torn and shattered bits of things, the debris left after some other’s fortune or misfortune had finally run its course, sucked up by the wind and scattered hundreds of miles, spread out over the land so that after a time you couldn’t tell it from natural rock, dirt, vegetation. All this stuff didn’t deface the landscape, and it wasn’t junk, for the land had made it its own. There was something immensely and dangerously appealing about that.
What he didn’t think he had expected were the street people in the western cities, the hitchhikers in shabby clothes out on these long, dusty roads. It made sense when you thought about it, he guessed—they’d be drawn to warmer climes, some place where they wouldn’t freeze to death sleeping in a doorway or under a bridge. Or maybe he noticed all these ragged figures in the shadows of not-very-tall buildings because already he’d come to expect them, the ones who had lost everything, or who had left all they’d had.
“The wolf is at the door,” he’d whispered to the shadows moving past. They would know exactly what he was talking about. So what could you do? There was no way to get rid of the wolf, so you got rid of the door, of course, on the well-proven theory that you couldn’t lose what you didn’t have.
Losing the house to the bank had been almost a relief, although Monica didn’t think so. She’d never understood what a prison it had become, with all the things inside he’d had to protect. Better to be outside, wandering from place to place, taking only what you had to take, and keeping nothing for very long. Better to be the wolf than to be afraid of the wolf.
Frank didn’t know and didn’t care how many miles he’d traveled since escaping his home state of Virginia; he’d never looked at a map, his route hadn’t been anything like a straight line, and he hadn’t kept track of the zigs and zags. Though he didn’t trust his own judgment, just before the car died he’d been daring to think he might have gone far enough, because the civilized world had begun to recede, worn and rubbed out by the persistent land. Passing through cities, which became rarer and smaller the longer he was on the road, he experienced the long fade, streets and buildings growing more faint, figures in gutters and ditches less definable, faces less organized, until they were just a recent memory, lost in a backsplash of dust. He’d known to expect that, too; it was why he’d come here.
Here at last, a vast flatness had swallowed every sign of human habitation but this skeletal little settlement, and the flatness itself had about it a powerful sense of place. Once he’d entered it, he thought maybe he’d reached the beginning, beyond which there’d be nothing left to lose. But then more of the car fell off: the rear bumper and some anonymous but clearly important piece of the exhaust system, one of the side views and the red plastic cover off his right tail light. A fat spider crack appeared on the driver’s side of the windshield, though he hadn’t seen or heard anything hit, and with grim satisfaction he watched it spread. Then finally some bit dropped out of the cooling system, so that he came into town trailing smoke.
Situated with ironic convenience just inside the town limits was a service station. The Dodge limped in and rattled and wheezed to a stop. A small man in his mid-sixties, gray coveralls, ambled out as the car collapsed into its own steam. “Howdy, mister, you lost?”
Frank grinned; they actually said howdy. “Well, I don’t know where I am, but I’m not exactly lost. Knowing where I am is not high on my list.”
The attendant leaned against the single pump, sizing him up in a way that Frank suspected was a lost art, like phrenology. “Well, sir, be a week minimum before I can get to your car. Only mechanic in town. You might wanta call one of the big places in Albuquerque or Flagstaff, if that wait’s gonna make you suffer.”
“Use it or junk it,” Frank said on an impulse. “It’s yours.”
“Chrysler makes a good car.”
“I won’t need it anymore.” Frank made his voice go soft, insinuating more meaning than there was in his statement.
“Deal,” the man agreed mildly, as if he’d had this conversation before. Indeed, as Frank got out of the car he saw three or four other junkers around the station, left, no doubt, by other newcomers who’d made it only this far on wheels. Not a few western towns had gotten their start in this very way, only back then it had been wagons heading for California.
“What’s the name of this place?”
“Los Perdidos.” The Anglo mechanic, already squatted behind the Dodge to pry with a screwdriver at the rusted screws on its license plate, pronounced the name with such a complete lack of Spanish accent that at first Frank, who spoke only a very little Spanish himself, didn’t catch what he’d said. Grunting, the mechanic pulled the plate off and held it up like a trophy. “I been needing one of these. Didn’t have a Virginia. Glad you came by.” He grinned slyly at Frank and repeated, more slowly but still with no linguistic acknowledgment that the words were not southwest American English, “Los Perdidos. Means ‘the lost ones.’ ”
Frank chuckled in appreciation. Back East, colorful place names tended toward the florid, poetic, or suggestive: Blacklick, Virginia; Two in a Bush, Pennsylvania. Out West, the most creative names people’d given their towns, mountain passes, rock formations, were more on the wry and desperate side: Last Chance and Purgatory, Colorado; the Devil’s Backbone; Death Valley. Los Perdidos, the Lost Ones, was perfect.
Before he could stop himself, he was hearing Monica, whose once-familiar voice he’d swallowed and held hidden in some deep place inside himself: “You were moaning and crying in your sleep again, Frank. I know, I know, ‘nothing’s wrong.’ I can’t get past that. I swear you push everyone away before you have the chance to lose them. But I’ve got news, Frank—in the end, they’re still lost.”
Actually, he didn’t try very hard to keep from remembering Monica. Like the books and the movies, she’d taught him what to expect.
The town’s only mechanic directed him to the town’s only grocer, who readily agreed to provide him a cot and meals in exchange for light manual labor. Frank settled in, as much as he needed to. It brought him gr
eat satisfaction, feeling like a monk or even a saint: no possessions and even the food and sleeping place belonged to someone else. They could steal everything else, but not your soul. Wasn’t that true? Hadn’t some great thinker promised that? He used to know things like that, a long time ago, but he’d lost the knowledge somewhere down the road. They could steal your books, but they couldn’t steal the ideas inside them, right? But you could lose those ideas over time, he’d discovered, in a gradual falling-out process not unlike losing your hair.
It took him no more than a day to learn the town: who served the best food, where to stand for the best view of the distant hills, where the prettiest girls lived (to look at, not to speak to), which people to ask for favors, which people to avoid. Each scene and piece of information became part of a mental collection with “Los Perdidos” inscribed on the cover in bright red dust letters. He’d study it again and again, he knew, caressing each item lovingly, but he also knew that someday he’d be ripping those pages out, losing them to the wind.
Soon he began walking at night. He made no conscious decision to do so—he simply fell into it. Suddenly it seemed such a natural thing: he breathed, he ate, he excreted, he walked at night. Out past the diner and the hardware store, through the broken circle of an abandoned corral to the dark desert beyond. Learning the place at night would, he saw, require much more time and a different kind of attention.
Los Perdidos had no streetlights or traffic lights, but houses were usually illuminated and there were occasional headlights, motorcycle singles as common as the doubles of cars and pick-ups and RVs. Away from town and off the road, there was no light but the beam of the flashlight his boss had let him have.
At night the desert seemed to have far more features than in daylight. Under his sneaker soles Frank felt bumps and cavities, undulations and rough spots, and once in a while he would sense a solid mass nearby, protruding from the ground just enough for him to have tripped over if his path had been slightly different, or shoulder-high, or looming over his head, almost but not quite touching his flesh as he passed.
“You oughta take care,” the storekeeper advised. “Don’t wanta go too far from home in the desert at night. Might get good and lost.”
Frank almost couldn’t speak, having been ambushed by the word “home,” which, with any luck, he’d never be in a position to use again. “Right,” he managed, hoping to sound nonchalant.
The storekeeper wasn’t ready to let it go. “It’s happened, you know. Folks wander off and don’t come back. Fellow from Santa Fe four-five winters ago, car broke down too far outside town to make it in to Brady’s, started walking and got off the road somehow and froze to death in the desert.”
“Stay in your car,” Frank recited solemnly. “Don’t start walking in the middle of the night in winter.”
The other man regarded him evenly. “Tourists from somewhere back East, newlyweds, thought it would be romantic or some fool thing to do it under a desert moon. Rattlers got ’em.”
Belatedly realizing to what “do it” alluded, Frank agreed, barely suppressing a guffaw, “Damn fools. See what love’ll do to you?” He clapped the storekeeper’s shoulder. “I promise you, my friend, I won’t do it in the desert. Okay?”
“We got ghosts, too.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Spirits. Kids who’ve gotten lost out there. Run away. Or been left. We lost another one, a young boy, just a few months ago. Seems to me we lose more folks to that desert than to anything else. Don’t always find ’em, either, but we keep looking. Sometimes we find stuff, clothes or toys or something. That desert must be just full of what people left behind, forgot was theirs, or couldn’t see the sense in anymore.”
“Now don’t tell me.” Frank struck a pose, hand over his heart. “Those ghosts, those kids. They’re doomed to spend the rest of eternity wandering the desert out there, searching for parents. Right?”
The man scowled. “Hell, no. They don’t want to be found any more than the rest of us do. Any more than you do, smart ass. ‘Los Perdidos,’ you know?”
Now Frank dropped any pretense of playing along. “You believe all this crap?”
“They’re sad stories,” the man shrugged. “I like a sad story as much as the next guy. Sort of collect ’em, if you know what I mean.”
Despite his scorn, Frank found he was slightly spooked by the tales, and, though he didn’t stop his nighttime wanderings, he did make an effort not to stray too far too soon from town. Each successive night he deliberately widened his circle just a bit, always keeping a sense of the town’s tether, playing at getting lost but not quite getting there.
During the day, when he wasn’t stocking shelves or sweeping up in the store, he wrote letters he knew he would never send. If he let himself be cute about it, he might even decide to stick them in odd places, in a book or under a potted plant or in a pants pocket headed for the wash. Then he’d forget what he’d done. Sometimes he really did forget. Sometimes he lost just that much of his mind.
By the age of three or so, Frank had already begun what had turned out to be a lifelong pattern of giving away, losing, dismantling, destroying, or otherwise relinquishing his most prized possessions. Naturally, it drove his parents crazy. His earliest memories were of his mother’s rushed-morning frustration when, once again, she couldn’t find some necessary item of his clothing, and of his father’s helpless bafflement when a favorite book or toy was nowhere to be found at bedtime and Frank was, quite genuinely, inconsolable.
When Frank was a little older, his beloved grandmother had made for him, as she had for all the grandchildren, a doll as big as he was, brown eyes like his embroidered on the tightly stuffed head, black hair like his under a jaunty green cap Frank coveted for himself but was relieved the doll had, firmly stitched on. For a period of time Frank found gratifying now that he knew something about the attention span of a six-year-old, he and the Frank-doll were inseparable. Then he gave it to a kid in school he barely knew, an Army brat who promptly moved out of the country. Frank had made no attempt to hide what he’d done, whether because he didn’t understand it was shocking or because he did, and Granna, maybe to teach him about the power we have over those who love us, had made no attempt to hide her hurt. Now, in Los Perdidos, Frank thought about how much he’d loved his Granna and that doll she made for him; he wrote unmailable letters to them both.
For a while there, Frank mused, things had gotten a trifle bizarre. Sometime in junior high, he’d eaten the stuffing out of the belly of the blue-and-white panda he’d had since he was a baby, piece by cottony piece, then cut the rest of it into little chunks he could flush sadly down the toilet. He disassembled scores of action figures, snapping off every appendage he could and reattaching them backwards, in the wrong positions, mix-and-match; it gave him the creeps and, at the same time, made him really proud when he got the head of a GI Joe to fit in the shoulder socket of a Tarzan. He found old toys and decorated them with awful colors and strange designs. He mapped out the parentage and tangled relationships of each piece. Then he would leave them bunched together for weeks at a time, checking back periodically to see if they’d changed anything on their own. Sometimes he’d whisper nonsense into anything passing for an ear, and he’d wait for anything passing for a mouth to reply. Everyone thought his sweet black Lab got lost, and technically that was true. The whole truth was that he’d left her sniffing weeds at the side of a country road, so confident he was right behind her that she didn’t even look back, and he’d sped off as fast as he could with his brand new driver’s license in his chewing-gum-and-chicken-wire truck. “I hope you found a good home,” he wrote now to the dog, wincing at the memory and at the word, and, shaking his head at himself, buried the single-line note behind the store where years of scraping garbage cans had softened the dirt.
In college he was known as a ladies’ man, a heartbreaker, though that wasn’t exactly accurate. His fraternity brothers took to accusing him, admiringly, of
bringing out the worst in women; hey, thanks, little brother, his friends were ready and willing to lend a sympathetic ear to some girl’s complaints about how Frank had mistreated them. None of them had stayed friends with him long. He’d brought out the worst in them, too. Barely recalling any names, of his buddies back then or of any of the girls he’d loved and lost, he wrote a sort of generic apology and thought he ought to let it blow away in a high desert wind, but settled for throwing it into a cluttered drawer.
Every night now he went walking. During the days, while he did his little jobs at the store, wrote his truncated missives, or made small talk with the storekeeper and the mechanic and the morning waitress at the diner where he ate breakfast, his mind worked on ways to increase the risk and, therefore, the thrill. He went out later. He stayed up all night and went out just before dawn, giddy from lack of sleep. He drank a couple of beers before setting out, smoked a joint. He left the flashlight in his room.
His eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness, but most of his perceptions about the landscape he journeyed through were coming from other senses. He heard sand and the loose movements of coarse dirt. He tasted alkali, and the ozone from lightning strikes. He felt the pull of the giant moon. When formations rose around him and subsided and rose again higher, it was their odor that somehow convinced him they weren’t of any material he’d ever encountered before or been led to expect, not rock or sand or petrified wood or bone. It seemed to him that other senses were stirring, too, and that he was on the verge of perceiving other things in other ways. He tried not to be impatient and was determined not to be scared off. In the distance, other shadows traveled their own circles and spirals.
The wolf is at the door, Monica whispered quietly from far away.
Then came the night when his circles around Los Perdidos unraveled altogether, and he was, finally, lost. Suddenly he had no idea even in what direction the town lay. The moon, a thick crescent now, was so huge out here it disoriented rather than guided him, and its too-bright light distorted the desert, which reflected it oddly.
