(Pages 144–164)
Desert in Bloom
Mojave Desert, California, USA
Yellow rubble along the road. A sprawling wasteland, countless miles left behind in the four hours Faye had spent driving towards an ever-receding dusty horizon.
She arrived at noon. Heat surged into the car. The windshield, side mirrors, even the dashboard was coated in grease. The motel glistened in the sun.
When Faye had first heard that the desert came into bloom in early summer, she had imagined Technicolor flowers, shiny, rubbery, fleshy green leaves, lotus flowers, amaryllis, dark-eyed turnera, fire lilies, devil’s hair. A world of tropical plants had branded itself into her mind and, after countless previous attempts in which something always coincidentally seemed to get in the way, she had finally gotten into her blue vintage BMW and had driven east from Los Angeles.
[…]
She’d needed courage to take this trip into the desert. But she believed courage was nothing more than naiveté, and now was disappointed even though she hadn’t driven to the desert to see flowers. The mounds of rubble didn’t show the slightest semblance of green.
The ground was scorching. As soon as Faye got out of the car, the hot, hard sand burned the soles of her flip flops. She hurried into the shade of the motel. It was a U-shaped building with a massive DESERT INN sign in giant red letters and an AAA sticker in front. The seal of the auto club was like a sedative in this wasteland. Mechanics couldn’t prevent earthquakes, but in the event of any other disasters, help would be on the way.
Faye picked up her key at the reception desk. She carried her bag into one of the identical rooms facing the parking lot out front. Her BMW glistened in the heat.
She was waiting for Leigh.
A group of quad riders appeared on the dunes in the distance. Their chests were bare. They held the heavy 4 wheel machines between their legs and raced up and down the sand dunes. Faye sat on the edge of the bed and saw the quads plowing the desert, sometimes nearer and sometimes further away.
After an hour, Faye got tired of waiting. She grabbed the bucket from the bathroom and filled it with ice cubes from the vending machine under the awning. She wrapped the ice cubes in a towel and pressed it to her neck. The ice hurt and she thought about Leigh and their telephone conversation, and about his shapeless, oversized clothes, and that he was the only thing that had ever bothered her about Emily. Emily had deserved a wild, crazy and beautiful Leigh, someone elegant and attractive, respected, renowned, a completely different Leigh. Not this one.
“I’m gonna hang up,” Leigh had said on the phone, “if you keep dissing me.”
“A little courtesy wouldn’t kill you,” he’d said.
“If you can’t change something, stop trying.”
“Let it go, Faye.”
“Just chill.”
“Listen,” he’d said. “Her stubbornness was her greatest asset.”
“You still think I fucked her. You think I fooled around with her and then dumped her. But I forgive you. I forgive you, because you can’t help yourself. A trauma never surfaces as something painful.”
“You’re the expert on that,” Faye had said.
The melted ice had soaked her blouse. The heat bore down on the roof. She could see the quad riders through the window. They were nearer to her now. She saw them reach the crest of the final dune before the road, stand erect and thrust their pelvises forward. The vehicles tipped headlong, the engines howled as though the drivers were furious at the sand for only submitting to their weight temporarily. The swollen tires had left nothing behind but a fleeting tread mark. The riders’ bodies were tattooed. Sand, suntan oil, and sweat coagulated into a shiny armor on their skin.
They pulled into the parking area in front. She saw that one of the riders was Leigh. She recognized him from his oversized shirt, his almost delicate physique, and felt relieved, but then caught herself. Leigh wore a helmet that didn’t suit his slim face. Everything he wore was too large. He was the only one who didn’t drive bare-chested. A woman sat behind him and blood rushed into Faye’s head. But it was not Emily.
The backlight made it appear as if Emily hovered like a mirage in the air. It would have never occurred to Emily to ride through the desert on a quad. She had great respect for the desert, for the ingenious hunting paths, accessible only with moccasins and meaningful only for their creators, the Chumash, the Diguenos, the Tongva. Paths that had long since been buried in sand, along with the artifacts of past existences, arrowheads, pottery, jewelry that had been pulverized, made invisible. Invisible but still present, as Emily said, there in the backlight, or as she would say, would have said, might have said, Faye thought, watching Leigh kiss the woman sitting behind him.
Emily had often retreated to the Mojave Desert to “shed her skin,” as she put it. Had put it, Faye thought. A thing of the past.
“The lighting out here is crazy,” Leigh said and took off the helmet. “Makes you lose your sense of reality.”
They stood next to the ice machine under the awning. Emily had always demanded that Faye share her enthusiasm for everything, but she couldn’t feel enthusiastic about Leigh, not even now. She had only seen him once before, and it wasn’t something she cared to repeat. Actually, she had never seen him properly, and now she forced herself to look him straight in the eye, while the woman standing next to him looked back at her, and Leigh smiled. She felt physically uncomfortable around him. His eyes were pale blue, the contours of his face indefinite. His skin looked as if it had been washed too often. The longer you looked at him, Faye thought, the more indistinct he seemed, and this was not due to the crazy lighting or the greasy sun, which was still high in the sky.
“Beret and I decided she should wait here while we drive to see Emily. Just in case you were worried,” Leigh said. He now had a goatee, a flimsy one, with thin fringes.
“Don’t be afraid,” Beret said, “I’m not gonna get in the way of your little adventure.”
“You didn’t tell her what this is about?” Faye said to Leigh. “That we’re not taking some joy ride?”
“You haven’t changed.”
“You mean compared to the one time we talked on the phone, or compared to the ten minutes we spent together in Emily’s kitchen when you refused to take off your scarf?”
The kitchen was Faye’s favorite place in Emily’s house. It was a large kitchen with a dining table that seated twelve. When they were alone, Faye sat at the narrow white bar next to a life-size head made of glass that Emily sometimes threw her hats on. Faye sat at the bar and watched Emily mix drinks. Emily liked making cocktails. She made Old Fashioneds, adding Angostura and orange slices cut into quarters. Or she made Negronis after the sun had gone down and they needed to discuss difficult subjects.
Once, somebody had brought her a bottle of absinthe from Europe. It was a special bottle with a dropper, a highly concentrated elixir for experts, just a few drops of it sufficed. They sat with their glasses under the loquat tree in the garden and didn’t dare drink any of it for fear they might go blind. They ended up pouring the stuff over the aloe vera plant, and laughing at the fact that they were such cowards and so far away from Europe.
Leigh was one of the difficult subjects they had discussed back then.
It wasn’t difficult because Leigh was a difficult person. Leigh had grown up in a suburb, in one of the satellite communities south of LA, inland, where the rent was cheaper. He had grown up in a house mounted on wheels, a trailer that could be driven anywhere if the real estate prices went up. He was white trash but had fought his way out and managed to get a scholarship, read female French philosophers, and listened to Latino pop. He hated being pigeon-holed and liked hanging out at the Blue Moon, a former club for soldiers, until a group of transgender people took it over. Leigh was a person who made crêpes, someone Emily had swooned over, and who now was friends with her. Friends or more.
Leigh was a difficult subject because Faye feared for Emily and Emily knew about her fear.
As soon as the conversation turned to Leigh, Faye would change the subject.
“Remember,” she said, for example, “how I used to stand in the middle of the schoolyard because I couldn’t find our classroom and you came and took my hand and showed me the way? Even if they’d tortured me, I never would have found it without you. I was totally disoriented.”
“Oh, don’t exaggerate.”
“If it wasn’t for you, I’d have never made it through elementary school.”
“Well, you were consistent if nothing else,” Emily said. “I could always rely on you to go in the wrong direction.”
Then one day Leigh was there, standing in the door. He had leant against the doorframe, until Emily had dragged him into the kitchen and introduced them to each other, first Leigh Faye, then the other way around. Neither of them said anything. Emily suggested making them a drink, a special “meet and greet drink,” and Faye knew it would be a Negroni because of the difficult situation, their special drink, which suddenly had lost all its meaning. Leigh didn’t have a clue about all that. He just nodded, relieved, and Emily told him to take off his scarf because it was summer and she didn’t want to turn on the air conditioning. She suggested wrapping the scarf around the life-size glass head.
“He needs our protection,” Emily said, kissing the glass forehead. “See? He’s completely at our mercy. He’s transparent, we can read anything we want into him.” She stood behind the bar and hunched her shoulders. She made herself so small that her head vanished behind the glass.
“And,” she said. “How do you like me now?”
The glass head in front of Emily’s face was transparent, while concealing her at the same time.
“Still the same old provocateur,” Leigh said to Faye under the awning. “Always ready with a zinger.”
Faye said nothing, and while Beret headed towards the reception desk, Leigh went back to the quad and unstrapped their overnight bag. Faye waited under the awning. Beret came back with the keys and Leigh went inside the room with her. When he returned, he said, “Are flip-flops all you’ve got?”
“Is that a problem?”
“Yes,” Leigh said. “Flip-flops are fucked on the quad.”
“I’m not planning to drive out on a quad with you,” Faye said.
“No?”
“I’ve got a car,” she said. “And I plan on using it.”
“I’m not driving into no man’s land in your old lemon.” Leigh handed her a pair of sneakers. “How about these?”
“Whose are they?” Faye asked.
“Beret’s. Who else’s?”
Faye slipped on the sneakers, and they put on their helmets, and suddenly Faye didn’t think it was such a good idea to drive out with Leigh. Before he started the engine, she said, “You were the last one who saw her.”
Leigh nodded.
“You have a responsibility,” Faye said. “I expect you to get me there safely and back again.”
Leigh looked at Faye. Then he slowly peeled the beard off of his chin.
“Did you think it was real?” He took a leather pouch from the chest pocket of his shirt. “Chromosomes,” he said contemptuously. “Genetics. Hormones. The cult of the natural.” He stuffed the beard into the pouch. “Why did we bother inventing the individual when we stifle all its possibilities? Yet everybody clings to the idea as though it were some kind of salvation.”
He glanced at the quad riders who had dropped into the Driver’s Ranch. “See those guys?” he asked. “Did they frighten you? At first they look like they’re doing the usual macho act, tough guys talking the talk, who can’t walk past a woman without making some lowlife comment. In fact, they’re into something entirely different.
I know two of them from my seminar. Third-wave feminists. The whole nine yards. Not really my thing, not enough gender hacking, too wishy-washy, but better third-wave than no feminism at all.”
The Driver’s Ranch was a roughhewn shack with a corrugated iron roof, where they served omelets with french fries and pumped-up burgers for breakfast. The riders sat in the shade of the veranda. The overheated, tattooed armor trembled when they ate, their bloated muscles covered in sailboats, helmets, bare asses, a pierced heart.
“Right,” Faye said, “Orthodox feminists. That’s exactly the impression they make.”
“Faggots,” Leigh said. “If you want to hang out with them, you’d better have more to offer than the ideal proportions of your cock.”
The courtyard glimmered in the heat.
“Let’s get going.”
Leigh was still looking at the Driver’s Ranch. “The beard. It’s a reminder that our desire has a terrifying precision. I can’t remember who said that, but I think it’s true.”
“OK.”
“Nothing’s okay,” Leigh said. “As long as you blame me for Emily’s disappearance.”
“You’re the one she wanted to see. The day before she disappeared. You saw her last.”
“Maybe.” Leigh mounted the quad and started the engine. “But I never wanted anything from her.”
“And I suppose you don’t want anything from Beret either?” Faye shouted over Leigh’s shoulder.
“Depends,” Leigh shouted, “on the impression we make.”
The sneakers were too small. They pinched but Faye suppressed the pain. She thought about Emily. She tried to imagine what Emily must have thought the last time she was there. She concentrated on holding on, since Leigh drove fast, the ground was bumpy, and the quad had lousy shock absorbers. Leigh left the main road and they drove into the yellow desert. The dust swirled upward, making it difficult to breathe–the dust and the heat–but after a while they got used to it. Leigh headed towards a group of Joshua trees that seemed to be swimming in the distance. They looked like underwater plants that were swaying under an invisible current. The San Andreas Fault was not far away, an eerie border between the desert and city.
The fault was a reminder that the earth was molten, a fiery stream under the edges of two plates, the surface gaping open above. The plates drifted in opposite directions. Each year the Pacific and North American plates moved two inches closer to each other, and it was merely a matter of time before the nuclear power plant that had been built on top of these floating strata of earth, along with its reactors and fuel rods and holding basins, would be crushed by the plates, melting the desert and the city into a huge radioactive hell.
Sand splashed under the wheels like heated water and Faye clutched the side handles.
The kitchen in Emily’s house was a place where Faye had felt at home. There weren’t many places like that and none where she had felt as completely safe as she had there. Now it seemed totally unlikely she had ever been there.
Back then, there had been no “for sale” sign on the lawn. Back then, the bougainvillea had been watered regularly. She hadn’t yet said to Emily, “You and your beautiful soul always clinging to these fucked up guys. But hey, everybody needs a calling in life. And you helped me get through my screwed-up childhood. I don’t exclude myself from being messed up too. After all, half of this goddamned city is messed up. And that makes people like you in high demand.”
That was the evening Emily had mixed no drinks. The evening she had not sat on a barstool, had not sliced an orange in quarters, the evening when the glass head had remained hatless. Emily had not bothered to take off her hat. It was already dark outside, almost Christmas, a string of lights had been blinking somewhere. But Faye had only noticed them later. Only in retrospect had she noted the blinking lights. In the sleepless nights after Emily’s disappearance, she had begun to see the string of lights as a warning signal. The blinking had warned of danger, had marked the evening before Emily’s disappearance, but she had overlooked this sign.
Emily had not gone to the bar. They had not even reached the kitchen. Trembling, she had stood in front of the big windows in the entryway. She had just come back from seeing Leigh. Or she had wanted to go to Leigh. Or Leigh did not want her to come to him, but she wanted to try anyway, and Faye had lost her temper, had looked down on them both, as if from a great distance. “Don’t worry, Emily,” she had said coolly. “I’m sure he’ll ask you to marry him soon. You’d be a lifesaver, given his financial situation. Or rather her? Should I say she? Or how about its? You never know with those unique people. At least you won’t have to worry about attracting attention, you and your endangered Gynander. It’ll be the freakiest wedding in Beverly Hills. I bet you’ll even make it to the cover of Vanity Fair.”
“Leave,” Emily had said. “Get out. Fuck off!”
They didn’t pass a single tree, a single shrub. The ground was flat as if it had been steamrolled. Leigh stopped and when they got off the quad they saw a pattern in the sand ahead. Up close, they could see gorges running fifteen to thirty feet deep. The passages in the sand were like a labyrinth, the earth had fallen off vertically, as if somebody had dug trenches with a giant spade.
“Down there,” Leigh said. “That’s where it is.”
They climbed down one of the gorges, way below sea level, Faye thought. It was shady there, but not cooler. Slides made the ground uneven. Heaps of gravel along the path gave way under their feet, sometimes they had to duck under an overhang made of sand that had formed a bridge, where the surface of the earth hadn’t yet collapsed.
Leigh walked ahead and Faye had a chance to observe him from behind, his muscular legs, his slender back, the straight shoulders that led to a soft, shaved downlike neck, the neck of a beautiful woman. She’d have liked to know if Emily had seen that, if she had always seen Leigh that way, with a shirt sliding from the shoulders and skin that was sunburnt. He didn’t look so bad from the back. Faye tried to imagine Emily in this narrow pass, wearing sneakers or flip flops. Maybe she had been happy because the desert absorbed and enveloped her, or she felt restless, because solitude and vastness terrified her. She tried to imagine what Emily had seen in this desert.
The gorge led to a circular opening. The sky above was pale, almost white, and when Leigh turned to Faye, his face was white too.
“Emily put herself at your mercy,” Faye said.
“It’s a voluntary decision, I’m assuming, to put yourself at somebody’s mercy.”
“You pushed her away!”
“It’s all just a matter of interpretation,” Leigh said.
“You really are merciless.”
The area was surrounded by sand walls. There was a hollow in the ground on one side and Leigh went there to take a look.
The hollow was filled with charred wood and burned branches. But it had been a long while since somebody had made a fire. The coal was white and half buried in the sand.
Faye watched Leigh as he bent down to pick up a branch, but she knew they weren’t going to find anything there.
“I can’t even remember her properly anymore,” she said. “The last remnants of my memory are all used up.”
There were no traces, not even carvings or signs on the sand walls, no artifacts of Tongva or Chumash that suggested it had been a sacred place. It was just a cave that lacked a roof.
“When Emily was still around,” Faye said, “the memories came too fast for me to process them.”
Leigh put the tank bag on the ground. He removed a thermos and two cups and handed one to Faye. When Faye didn’t respond, he sat down in front of the fire pit. “You should drink something,” he said, as he poured himself some tea. “Unless you’re planning on getting dehydrated.”
Faye said nothing. She just sat down. She was quite a distance from Leigh. She propped herself up with her arms behind her. She was waiting for Emily. She had never waited that way before. She waited without looking at Leigh, and the greasy light of the sun above the gorge enveloped them both. Faye waited so intensely she had the impression Emily would come running through the gorge at any moment and shout, There you are! What took you so long? I keep forgetting what a scaredy cat you are.
Then everything would be cleared up. No more fears, no questions. Emily would tell her everything. About the situation she had gotten involved in, a shooting, the wrong place at the wrong time, a fight, nothing to do with her, but one from which she had barely escaped.
And then Emily really did appear. She came out from the spot where the gorge curved round, an outline of color against the sandy ground. Faye first saw a child in red sandals and a sailor’s hat, but with every step Emily came closer, she grew older, and when she entered the cave, she wore her wrinkled white summer dress, the same one she wore the day she returned from Sequoia Park with Leigh.
Leigh screwed the thermos shut and leaned back against the sweltering wall that separated them from the molten interior of the earth.
Above their heads, at the height of the earth’s surface, Joshua trees floated like underwater plants in the heat. And if you considered things precisely, Faye thought, then they weren’t just below sea level, because the two of them were deeper than any sea. They had already been submerged in all the seas.
“Show me,” she said abruptly.
“What?”
“You know.”
Faye stood up and walked over to Leigh. She stood in front of him, casting her shadow on his face.
“Show me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Of course you know.”
“You’re just like Emily,” Leigh said without looking up.
“Do to me what you did to her.”
“What’s the point?” Leigh said.
“What did you do with her?”
Leigh looked at Faye. “You guys really must think I’m your circus horse,” he said quietly. “Do you even have a clue what you’re doing to me? You’re taking away my humanity,” he said fiercely. “You and your Emily.”
For a moment it was still. It was as still as it could only be in a ditch in the desert. The sky was no longer as white. It had dulled at the edges of the gorge to a matte blue, or was that Leigh’s eyes. Faye realized she was staring at Leigh, she was staring into that pale blue, losing herself in it, and when he held her gaze, and looked straight back at her, she looked away.
He reached for her hand. He pulled Faye down. But she resisted.
“Maybe it was too soon. But Emily knew one thing. She knew that our desire is precise,” he said. “And she knew that because of me. Even if you blame me a thousand times.”
“What was too soon?” Faye said.
“Oh, nothing.” He let go of her hand and she sat down beside him.
“What do you want?” he said.
All of a sudden, she didn’t know what to say, didn’t want to say something wrong, nothing that would stop her from finding out what had happened to Emily. Emily was the only reason she was there.
“Tell me what you want.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just tell me,” Leigh said.
Faye tossed her sneakers away which suddenly were smoldering hot.
“If you want to know what I did with her, you need to know what you want. Emily certainly would have known.”
“I’m not brave,” Faye said. “I’m not like her.”
Leigh hugged his knees. “If you were Emily, you’d probably say, I want your cock and I want your breasts.”
He stroked the sand with his fingertips until they were almost touching Faye’s foot. She recoiled and sat motionless. She realized Leigh didn’t know anything about the shooting. He had never found out, he simply had other concerns. And she also realized she had suspected him the entire time.
When Faye did not respond, Leigh said, “Emily might say, love me. Touch me. Do you feel how wet I am? I want you to feel that.”
Faye just sat there and the heat bore down on her head and neck and burned the soles of her feet and between her toes.
“Emily would say: I want you inside me. I want you to pull my lips apart and open me and come inside me,” Leigh said. “I want you to thrust into me slowly and deeply.”
They sat side by side, watching the movements of Leigh’s hand.
“And you?” Faye finally asked. “What do you say?”
Leigh held his hand still. When he remained silent, Faye said, uncertainly, “Does that turn you on? You’d say to her that her softness, her openness turns you on. They turn you into who you are.”
Leigh smiled but didn’t look at Faye. He looked over his knees into the fire pit.
“You’d say that you are everything for her,” Faye said, feeling dizzy, as if too much oxygen were suddenly being pumped through her body. “You are everything for her, and in that moment you are everything through her.”
“Yeah.”
“You thrust into her and when you feel her bend towards you, when you feel her desire, you also feel the contours and workings of your body, your cock, and you are no longer indistinct.”
“See,” Leigh said. “You do know.”
“You kiss her and enter her and feel how she gives in to you in your groin and in your belly.”
“Yeah,” Leigh said. “And she says: Stay. Please stay like this. But let me turn around, so I can feel you everywhere. Hold me with your hands and push inside me and then go faster. Lose control.”
“And you lose control,” Faye said.
“Lose control and take me with you, fuck me, love me, bend over a little, she would have said. Bend over. It turns me on to feel your breasts touching me, to feel them brushing against my back every time you thrust inside me.”
They sat there without touching and Leigh again began to plow the sand with his fingertips. To Faye it seemed as if her body had suddenly become transparent, superimposed over Emily’s. Or maybe it was the other way around, Faye thought. Emily’s body had become transparent, so that she, Faye, appeared from it.
And then there was the sand, the yellow embers of this desert that sifted through Emily’s splayed fingers. Her hands lay palms upwards on the loose ground, palms that were now grasped by Leigh, who was on top of her, pushing her with his entire body to the ground, and Emily got wet from his weight, his soft breasts, strong shoulders. She gave in, swept away by Leigh’s movement, slid back and forth and yielded to his hand, which he led downwards, over her belly and her thighs to the hem of her dress, which he pushed up in a single motion. He slid his hand down to her clit and cupped it with his fingers. Emily tried to twist away from him. She writhed to escape the pressure of his fingers, to ease it, to transform it into a caress but Leigh stayed, and the pressure stayed, and his body pressed her to the ground, held her down in the sand. And then she let go, let herself fall into his hand, until the pressure was just right, and her body softened nearly to a blur, and she needed to bend towards him to feel her boundaries and ignite where pressure and resistance were greatest.
When they returned to the quad bike, the sun was low. They had to hurry to reach the motel before dark. They hadn‘t spoken since they had finished the tea from the thermos, got up, and left. They walked silently through the gorge, and now they wordlessly put on their helmets. Leigh started the quad and they drove off, Faye resting her face on his back. She held onto him the way Emily would have wanted to.
She wasn’t afraid anymore.
In the last light, before the oblique shadows of the beginning night, Faye saw the pale carpet lying over the entire plain. Desert sage and brittlebush covered the rubble. Endives and Californian buckwheat, brown-eyed evening primrose blossoms, desert stars and gravel ghost gave the wasteland color, dark blue thistle sage and bright pink desert calico.