22
On the night of Deva’s birthday Alo honked his car in my driveway. I ran out with a perfect plan and a pounding heart. He was supposed to have picked Deva up already and we were to head out to the desert together. I had not seen her in weeks and now she would be here, in my house. My brother was playing street hockey with Creedence and his brothers in pajamas, and though it was January, a light warm breeze blew on my bare shoulders. Even my street seemed beautiful to me, like a self-contained universe that said life brimmed with possibilities. I skimmed over Alo’s truck—dusty and banged-up like I remembered—over his face and his smile and his outstretched hands, looking for Deva, but she wasn’t there.
“Where is she?” I asked without saying hello.
Alo smiled at me, bursting out of a new leather jacket. This one had silver studs. He had a red silk scarf wrapped around his neck. Someone else got out of the passenger side. A guy in an oversize flannel shirt with a red bandanna covering his bald head. Both of them had goatees. I glanced at my bright pink raver dress, sparkling knee-highs, and fuzzy white fur coat. My fingers were covered with the glitter I’d smeared on my eyelids. The three of us looked like a car crash.
“Man, your girlfriend is nuts,” Alo announced as he stretched out his legs. “We drove all the way into Topanga. She came down the driveway and told us she wasn’t ready. She said to tell you she’d be coming with some friends and see you in the desert.”
“Yeah, that’ll be easy!” His friend smirked.
I couldn’t hide my disappointment. “What do you mean ‘the desert’? We’ll never find her there.”
Alo shrugged his shoulders.
“I’m just as disappointed as you. Actually Ben here is,” he said, patting his friend’s shoulder with a giggle.
Alo’s voice was gone. He spoke in a raspy wheeze, like a loud, strangled whisper, and he’d grown a patchy beard around his long goatee.
“Did she say why?”
“Nope.”
“But you’re better off, man. Her friends looked like freaks!” Ben cackled. “Weird alien dudes in gas masks.”
They looked at each other and started laughing.
I felt a pang in my heart.
I embraced Alo briefly—a rush of stale cigarettes and the memory of his ashtray car the day of our adventure. I introduced myself to his friend. He had a sticky hand and must have been thirty. I looked back at Alo. Their presence in my driveway seemed suddenly inappropriate. I saw what I hadn’t fully deciphered in South Dakota. Neither he nor Ben could ever be good enough for Deva. They were rejects. She probably saw those goatees and right there in the driveway decided to ditch them.
The back of Alo’s truck was decked out with scattered blankets, dirty sleeping bags, and flannel pajamas.
“That’s your spot, girl. We can’t fit three people in the front.”
Ben got in the passenger seat and for a brief moment I wondered if it was a good idea to ride alone in the back of a truck with two guys I barely knew. But it was Deva’s birthday and she was in the desert and they were the only people who were going to take me there, so I hopped inside. Alo tucked me in. I looked at him and my eyes said don’t kill me and he must have read my thoughts because his face softened and he caressed my cheek.
“It’s really good to see you. I thought you’d never call me.”
“It’s good to see you too,” I lied.
He leaned in closer and looked at me with a vulnerability I didn’t know he had.
“I’ve wanted to talk to you so many times. Remember how I had cancer?” he asked.
I told him I did and asked him if he was okay.
He removed the silk scarf from his neck. There was a hole in his throat now. It was covered by a rubber cap. He tapped it.
“Took out my vocal cords. Laryngectomy.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said and stared at the cavity.
“My voice box is gone. Not gonna use a voice box either. Notice how I don’t have a voice?”
I had, yes. When he spoke it was like he had to catch his breath, as if the air was getting sucked out of some invisible place.
“You can relax,” he said. “People with holes in their throats don’t hurt young girls in the back of their trucks.”
Timoteo saw us. He skated over and asked me if I was going to be okay taking off with two guys. He gave Alo a suspicious scowl and leaned over the pile of flannel pajamas and blankets where I was stationed.
“Are you sure you want to go?”
“Of course. Just don’t tell Mom and Dad you saw me in the back of a truck, okay?”
Alo gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Your sister’s a big girl.” He winked and got into the driver’s seat.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” my brother whispered.
Maybe he saw what I was trying not to see, that postcard of what things were supposed to look like, and he compared it to what was actually there. Pickup trucks in California were meant to be loaded with surfboards and girls in bikinis, not dirty blankets and flannel pajamas. But every time doubt rose to the surface, I shifted my thoughts back to the desert and waited for the anxiety to settle into visions of sand and Deva. I was on my way to see her and that was all that mattered. I hugged my brother tight and kissed his cheek.
“Thanks for caring,” I said.
He kissed me, then pulled away abruptly, and skated away with his hockey stick waving from side to side. I sprawled on my makeshift mobile bed and knocked on the cab window to signal I was ready to go. Heavy metal came blasting from the inside speakers. The sleeping bag was warm enough. I looked at the stars, lulled by the movement of the car.
We rode to Hollywood to the sneaker shop where we were to pick up the secret directions. A woman in bright green body paint sat at the counter. She told me she was a leaf and that leaves were not to be confused with aliens. The rest of the store was crowded with ravers in extra-large pants, makeup, and fluorescent Super Mario suits.
“Take the 101 to the 10 East to the 605 North to the 210 East to the 58 until you are somewhere in the middle of the desert on a road called Grandview. Drive for miles until you see a boulder next to a Shell gas station. From there you will pull in to a dirt road and go straight.” A mysterious recorded voice gave the vague directions on the information line we’d dialed. Trance music played in the background. Alo and his friend seemed impatient. They didn’t want to go that far. They felt out of place.
We drove for hours into the night, crossing four freeways that felt like continents. Around two in the morning we reached a smaller dirt road in the middle of the dark desert. The pickup pulled over.
Alo stuck his head out the window. “Took a little detour, girl. Hope that’s all right.”
We were alone—just us and the desert. The two guys came out of the truck with their backpacks and proposed we get fucked up.
“I think we should go to the party. It’s already so late,” I said. Now I was worried and the worry took on a physical presence like one of my father’s black-tar hate paintings.
The desert was cold and dry. Ben took his denim jacket off and put it on my shoulders. Alo spread blankets on the ground a little farther up from the truck and sat down. They didn’t really like trance music, he explained. How about we just partied out there, the three of us? We had everything we needed, plus it seemed like Deva kind of ditched me anyway. Alo took a swig and offered me his flask of whiskey.
“To warm up,” he said, smiling. And his smile was this tender thing like a child trying to convince his parents that eating candy before dinner was a good idea.
“This isn’t what we agreed on,” I replied, ignoring the flask.
Alo passed a loaded pipe. “No peyote this time, unfortunately,” he cackled.
He wrapped his hands around my ankles and pulled me down on the blanket, hoping I’d relax. When he felt how tense I was, he giggled and raised his hands, surrendering. “We’ll go, we’ll go. I promise. I just wanted a chance to hang with you be
fore we enter a sea of strangers, okay?”
“Okay.”
Ben took a switchblade out of his pocket and started whittling on a piece of dry wood he’d found on the ground. It made a rough sound, like a carrot getting peeled backward.
“So why haven’t we seen each other all these months?” Alo whispered in my ear.
“I was busy with school,” I said, staring out into the dark.
Alo squeezed me against his chest, romantically. “I really missed you, you know? That night at the battleground was special for me.”
“Yes.”
He told me about the surgery. It had been bad, he said, but the good thing was he’d found a way to keep smoking. He did it directly from the hole in his throat now. It was almost the same feeling. I pulled away from him when he spoke, afraid he’d show me the new technique. I had not thought about him since he’d dropped me off in the Prairie Wind Casino parking lot in South Dakota. Now that I was close to him again—a thinner man with wrinkles around his lips, a patchy beard, and no voice box—I felt a rush of something. Guilt and pity and annoyance. He was poor, I thought. So poor he couldn’t even get a full beard to grow on his face. A poor, broken man. I thought about him and how poor he was and how the hole in the throat was an entrance to his soul—a dirty, bleeding soul—and again I was thinking about the poor people of America with their missing body parts and how right Henry was about things getting cut rather than fixed. I hugged him back because if his voice box was missing, he must have been one of the worst off. But all the time I was hugging him I felt and knew I could do nothing for his missing body part.
“I’m sorry about your voice being gone,” I said. “I don’t think you should smoke anymore.”
The chunk of sadness and worry hovering over me began to settle on us so we both got sad. It became obvious that our being in that desert together was wrong. Ben kept doing his thing, peeling his stick with the switchblade. Alo downed his whiskey in a gulp. I got up and wiped dust off my knees and leaned over to give him a kiss.
“I have to go pee. I’ll be right back.”
Alo’s eyes lit up. I was going to stop annoying him about going to the rave and finally relax and sit with him there.
When I reached the back of the truck, I quietly picked up my bag and kept walking. I moved out of the darkness toward the sound of cars on the far-off road. I didn’t look back and once I was on the road I began to run. A few cars zoomed past. I kept ironing out my dress with my fingers, hoping it didn’t seem too short. The wind carried the sounds of distant electronic music. A glow-stick cactus installation and a pink laser beam shooting up from nearby plains told me I was approaching my final destination. A car pulled over and a group of kids asked me if I was going to the moon tribe party. I said I was and they let me in. They were my age. They were not dressed in leather or denim. No scarves around their necks.
The car pulled in to a new dirt road. We reached a group of men in bright orange vests who guided us toward a parking lot brimming with hundreds of dusty parked cars. When we stepped out it felt like we’d set foot on the moon or discovered a new planet populated by comets on fire and giant daisy installations.
A huge stuffed teddy bear came running toward us.
“There’s a bouncing house! Let’s go!” he screamed.
He searched his pockets, took out a plastic bag full of translucent pills, and gave us two each. We followed the bear and rolled down the hill until we arrived in front of a great desert sprawl. The central stage was set up with speakers as tall as buildings. Thousands of fluorescent bodies faced a wall of sound, dancing like a tribe in syncopated hopping moves—all clenched teeth and dilated pupils. Next to the stage was an Alice in Wonderland–themed bouncing house. The bear jumped in and reached out for us to follow. Everyone went in, but the MDMA he had given me began to kick in. I felt my jaws lock and a burst of warmth trickled inside my throat. I was afraid of the bouncing house and the girls in pigtails jumping with pacifiers in their mouths. There were too many people.
I began to wander away, but everyone appeared to me like a seamless wave of colors and electronic sounds and I couldn’t tell faces from arms, human voices from electronic drones. I walked like a soul in torment and stopped in front of every swinging reddish ponytail. I chewed my tongue until my legs went out and I could not do anything that wasn’t sitting down. I stumbled to the ground and knew that I looked like one of those girls who just couldn’t take it. I’d gotten that far on my own and now I was stuck inside my own body. A small hill behind me was the only place that wasn’t crowded. I forced myself to get up and brave the short distance. Halfway up the knoll I managed to remain standing. For a moment the music felt great. I lifted my left arm in the air and swayed gently, looking at the crowds below. Then I collapsed again. Only for a minute, I told myself, but I spent the rest of the night on that dirt patch, staring at a sea of colors, grinding my teeth. After a few hours some people running down the knoll toward the party stopped to ask me if I was okay. I tried to smile and sent them away because I could not speak. A girl with light blue hair leaned toward me and handed me a bottle of water. She pushed a pacifier pendant from her necklace into my mouth.
“That will make it better. Keep it.”
And it did. I chewed and chewed until things fit back in order and bones felt like bones again, flesh became real. Angles and edges returned to my cheeks and chin.
The sun began to creep up behind the desert rocks and everyone lost their mystery at once. Smudged faces, busted eyes, swollen lips, and dilated pupils confounded by the presence of daylight. Everyone wished to shut off the light, erase the motion of the earth, kick the sun back behind the hill. The smarter ones got in their cars and drove away. I hoped Alo and Ben were among them. The vastness of the desert was too much to take in by day. The intimacy and tribalism disappeared in an instant. The cratered land had been everyone’s cozy living room at night but now it was a filthy service-station bathroom with vomit and piss steaming across the dirt. I stayed to watch the lost ones under the stage who weren’t ready to go home. They had sunscreen and vitamin C and Vicks VapoRub to keep their highs going, and they danced in a torment below the speakers. That’s when I saw her. She was spinning in circles with her eyes closed, face smeared with glitter and gold, eyelids heavy with Egyptian eyeliner. She glowed from within, listening to a melody nobody else could hear.
I slipped off my knee-highs and put my bare feet on the ground, thinking if only I could feel the soil beneath me, I would be able to move again. A soft wind slid through my heart. I began to transpire with a warm feeling that leaked out and recirculated through my pores. Suddenly I was able to walk again and everything seemed simple. I put one foot in front of the other and kept going until I reached her cool bare arms.
“Deva,” I said, moving hair away from my eyes. “Happy birthday.”
She still smelled of bay leaves and patchouli, but her eyes were a darker green now, as if distance had accumulated density in her pupils. She seemed older. I held her and put my hands on her hips. The dirty desert morning transformed into California dawn. She hugged me back. I’d never seen her so thin. I kissed her hair and when I looked at her again, her strong, concrete eyes turned watery and began to dart around my periphery, unfocused, burning with their usual urge to move on. She laughed—a begging, pained expression—and introduced me to her friends, all lanky and transformed. They were too high to be friendly. We didn’t shake hands.
I reached for her wrist, wanting to take her away.
“I’m sorry. I looked for you, but got carried away,” she said.
I pretended it wasn’t a big deal, wasn’t that what everyone did at parties? Got together, swarmed in unison, split up, and found each other again at dawn like in a migratory bird dance?
“Your father,” I reminded her, gripping her wrist more firmly now. “You said you had to be back in the morning for your birthday hike.”
Deva looked up to a corner of the sky. The sun was out. Fu
n gone from her face.
“We have to go, yes! He’ll kill me.”
—
We found a ride back to Topanga with some friends of Deva’s. Things seemed simpler in the daylight. We stopped at a gas station and bought Gatorade because we were all dehydrated. From the edge of the cement lot we could now see cars scattered across the land, blasting music. Impromptu parties were happening under dry plants—brief spurts of dragged-out festivities. On our way back, we popped in a cassette of the night’s highlights, a kind of bootleg recording Deva’s deejay friend had given her. Deva rolled down her window and stretched her arm out, her hand mimicking the movement of a boat rolling up and down on the tide. She hummed to herself, one hand waving at the Mojave moon turf, the other holding a cigarette. I kept glancing over at her, hoping she’d betray some emotion toward me, but she was in some far-off place.
The freeway that would take us back to Los Angeles was visible in the distance as we descended a sharp winding hill. Curve followed curve and I remembered I had been on that road before, driving much faster, my father at the wheel. It was the place where my brother had fallen off his bicycle and split his knee open the first week we’d moved to Los Angeles. I recognized the Mount Sinai hospital in the distant valley. I remembered my brother’s little body appearing from behind a curve, walking toward us covered in blood, my mother hitting my father, crying. I saw now how sharp and blind each curve was. Why allow a kid to dash down that road without a helmet?
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake Page 23
