path: root/unseen/research/tucson/tucson2.txt

"Mama says the sand massages your gums and makes them soft and then your teeth fall out and you chew them up in dreams when you're anxious you're anxious arencha Claire?"

"Who told you I was anxious? Do you even know what anxious means?"

"Momma says you're anxious cause you're tyin soon and you loose everything and your teeth fall out."

"How old are you Darren?"

"I'll be eight soon."

"And your mother told you I was nervous..."

"No she said anxious."

"Right. Anxious, because I'm..."

"Because soon you'll be pregnant and fat and you'll start dreaming your teeth is falling out."

"Are falling out."

"Are falling out."

Claire regarded her nephew and for a moment considered telling him everything just to spite his mother, but instead she grabbed the green and purple Supersoaker from the middle of the table and abruptly ended timeout in favor of distraction. Darren shrieked and took off across the gravel yard headed for the back gate. Claire arched the stream of water up but it was too late, he disappeared through the gate and into the desert.

It was too hot to give chase. Claire walked out into the gravel yard swinging the squirt gun from her finger and stepping carefully between barrel cacti and Cholla, the nastiest of the Sonora's spiny, rather unfriendly inhabitants. The minute she emerged from under the slatted patio cover she could feel the midday sun seering her pale skin. She glanced at her arms as if they might have already, in five minutes time, began to burn. She called out to Darren but heard nothing. Probably he had gone down the street to his friend's house.

Darren's mother was looking out at Claire from behind the sliding glass door, she waved from behind the glass, comfortable in her air conditioned cocoon; Claire smiled and waved back stifling the urge to mouth bitch at her. Claire's aunt lived just outside of Tucson, the patio was atop a small hill overlooking the Catalina foothills and the vast expanse of desert just west of them. Finding an relatively clear, cactus free area Claire leaned her head back and shot a stream of water straight up in the air. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth with her tongue extended waiting for the water to return to earth, which it eventually did, splattering her face and causing her to cough, choke briefly and start laughing.

Claire had heard the chewing sand story about a million times, from her aunt, her uncle, her mother, the whole damn family, the only one of them that never seemed to tell the story was the one person who had actually chewed sand. It was a story told so many times it had ceased to have any meaning, it had been reduce to words, sounds formed with mouths and lips but completely divorced from comprehension or understanding. Claire had always felt bad for the story, like it was blushing every time it heard itself start, sort of how Claire felt when her father introduced her again to his neighbor whom she had known for the better part of a decade. Claire could never decide whether her father actually thought she hadn't met the man or whether he was simply too excited to introduce her to his friend to consider that he had already done so many times. And she had long ago decided everyone telling the sand chewing story was simply too excited to stop themselves. It was the best story the family had. In some ways it was the only story they had.

Claire walked back to the table and lit a cigarette. She took another sip of the now almost hot wine that remained in the plastic cup her Aunt had thrust in her hand earlier. it tasted a bit like peach juice, but in the heat it had the desired effect rather rapidly. She decided to see where Darren had gone and wandered back through the yard and out into the river gully running just beyond the back fence.

At the end of the street the river bed disappeared mysteriously into a drain pipe and was not seen again above ground for twenty miles or so. Claire picked her way up the embankment and climbed a small hill where she sat down and finished her cigarette. The desert below was sketched out in watercolor hues of sand and rock that surged together over the rolling canvas until all that remained was the sensation of washed out pink with only the river and its groves of Palo Verde and Mesquite standing out from the blushing sand. Claire felt the river as an after thought, an architect's final over-the-top push on an otherwise sedate and monochromatic palette. She could hear the committee, we simply must have water, you have got to put water in there somewhere, and so the frustrated and overworked architect picked up a muddy green brush and simply drizzled it Pollack-like on the ground. The desert had countless hidden details not visible from the observatory position Claire occupied. 

Claire watched the river and wondered what its name actually meant. It seemed odd to her that she had lived next to or around the Rialto River for so many years without ever wondering what the word meant. 

She felt as if she were herself a desert only recently become aware that someone had flung a river down on her. Or with desert ambivalence she had always had a river running around her but had simply never noticed it. What then does the desert make of the river? This was the thought that had propelled her outside, away from couch bound relatives, inquisitive nephew in tow. As she studied the scene that was cascading down the slope and away from the organization of the manicured patio and yard, she decided that the desert seemed to ignore the river entirely. The river was starting to flood, somewhere far upstream three days rain had been feeding until it swelled like a Christmas ham, but ten yards on either side and it was sand again. Stagnant pink sand interspersed with prickly plants and clumps of sagebrush and Mesquite trees, ironwood her grandfather called it. The sand didn't care for the water, didn't hold onto it, didn't even try, just let the water flow right on over it, puddle and collect, run off and feed into the river. Farther in the distance there were the mountains ringing the desert, keeping watch over it, making sure it behaved in some general way. 







To some people the desert is a hot wind at the gas station, something passing through and to be passed through. Others see a sunny retreat from cold wind billowing off northern lakes. Some see it as an endless playground of sunshine, golf and hotel pools. Some are just born into it and forget to leave. Claire did not think she looked nervous or worried. She suspected that her older and more malicious nephew had put the younger up to this sort of thing. She felt she had composed herself rather well throughout the evening, dealt admirably with the blistering afternoon heat and then amicably with the barely known relative and extended family that stopped by to wish her well. It alarmed her that she could so completely separate the words coming out of her mouth from the ones forming in her mind. When will they slip over, some sort of damn break loose and everything comes tumbling out. She thought of the sea gulls leaping into the air, they hunched slightly coiling up to spring of the ground and then their wings lifted them into the wind.


She glanced back at the patio to see if anyone was watching her and, satisfied that they were all busy, she sent her nephew inside. She slipped over the wrought iron fence and lowered herself down to the sand. There was a trail leading down in the general direction of the river and Claire followed it walking slowly and keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes and scorpions. A breeze had begun almost as soon as the sun sunk behind the Catalina Mountains, not strong enough to bend the stiff twiggy branches of desert trees, it moved though in whispers, puffs of air brushing against her cheek.  She thought of airports, hospitals, departure points, the shuffling of human feet moving in and out of rooms like last quiet sighs of breath. The noise of the river grew louder as she drew near it. She stopped and sat down on a large rock nestled half under the branches of a Mesquite Tree. After making sure no one had followed her. She took a cigarette from the crumpled pack hidden in the back pocket of her jeans. She didn't immediately light it, but held it under her nose inhaling the sweet faintly chemical smell of unlit nicotine. Daniel did not see the simple joys of smoking, he was capable only of the bad things, the death, the cancer, the disease, things Claire recognized, but did not allow to write the whole story. She had tried to tell him one afternoon on the beach. Don't you love the smell of nicotine? Don't you love that you can feel the smoke slipping between your fingers? I love that feeling; it makes me want to slide off a silk robe at the edge of a warm bathtub. Don't you love when your hands get that smell of oily blacktop after a thunderstorm? He had stared at her in disbelief. Claire was going to quit; she already knew that, she just wanted an admission that there was some beauty, some tangible good in a cigarette, that the end of the story was not just death and disease. 

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Ambrose had just stepped out into the evening heat when the cloud of dust forced him to close his eyes and entirely miss the bumpy, lurching arrival of the truck. He was still standing in the shadows of the garage wiping his face with a greasy rag when he heard the door slam and the inevitable gravel crunch of footsteps coming his way. Squinting against the glare of the setting sun he stepped out of the shadows and was just able to make out a figure limping toward him when a woman's voice startled him.


"Sorry about the dust."


He turned toward her and shrugged as if to say that it was expected. She had already removed the cap from the gas tank and stood dragging what Ambrose thought of as a dainty leather boot in a half circle through the gravel. Three girls still sitting atop a pile of trundles and suitcases in the back of the truck were squirming in a fit of giggles. Ambrose noticed the girl in the middle, her mouth was laughing, but her eyes were much more piercing than the two that were clearly her siblings. He eyes seemed to be reflecting the first bit of sunset so the she looked a little on fire, which added to intensity of her gaze. Ambrose felt suddenly uncomfortable. The image of her eyes stayed in front of his even after he turned his face away. He could feel her eyes burning, he felt himself somehow caught in them, he began to sweat. He tried to busy himself with pumping gas, but regrettably it took little concentration. He looked at the pump and let the glare of the setting sun momentarily blind him. A strange loping sound caused him to look away and as color slowly returned to field of vision a strange figure took shape. A man slightly older than himself was limping across the gravel driveway. He had a curious way of walking, one side of him appeared to be badly crippled, from polio, Ambrose guessed, but the other side of him looked like it could pull down a charging steer with it's one good arm. Consequently he sort of loped to his left, dragging his right behind him.


Ambrose turned back around and found the woman studying him.


"That's my son Jim."


"Oh."


"The polio gave him that way of walking..."


"I figured." Ambrose mumbled, unsure what to say.


"The doctors told me he would never walk again and that it was best to keep him in a dark corner of the house and try to forget about him. Well, they didn't say that exactly, but that was what they meant. As you can see He had other ideas."


"Yes, ma'am. Never liked doctors."


"Well, they also told me to come to Arizona on account of my husband. They said that the clean air would be good for his tuberculosis."


She gestured to the back of the truck and Ambrose stood on his tiptoes and looked over the slated wormwood sides to noticed that the bed of the truck was outfitted with a crumpled mattress upon which a very much dead looking man was reclined. For a moment Ambrose thought he might indeed have perished on the journey, but then the eyes opened and revealed a glassy pained look that was quickly swallowed in a cacophony of hacking desolate sounds. The three girls had ceased their laughter and were staring liquid eyed in Ambrose's direction. All three seemed relatively unconcerned with the fit of coughing emitting from the reclining man.


She paid him in coins and the crippled man climbed back in the passenger's side of the truck. The engine coughed back to life after a few sputters that Ambrose attributed to a grungy distributor cap. The truck crept across the gravel drive and lurched out onto Prince road. Ambrose watched them for while, long enough to see brake lights in front of Vida court. I knew it he thought. He turned around and walked back into the garage and grabbed his cigarettes. He pulled down the garage doors, yanked the chain that turned on and off the lighted sign that Mr. Munson was so proud off, visible from the highway he said, though Ambrose lacked car so he couldn't say for sure. He made his usual tour of the building turning off lights and locking doors. He flipped the open sign over and stepped outside locking the front door behind him. Satisfied, Ambrose fished out a cigarette and lit it, pausing for a moment, watching the thunderheads over the Catalina Mountains begin evening's journey toward crimson. After a moment he shoved his hands in his pockets and began walking down the street toward the Vida Court.

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The Rialto River was indeed rising. Claire reached behind her and unself-consciously pulled the back of her shirt down even with the hem of her pants so that the scar didn't show. But she didn't do it to hide the scar she did it because she had always done it because there had nearly always been the scar and the memory of needles and the clear antiseptic smell of epinephrine the wheezing drowning pull at the bottom of her lungs the suffocating crush. This is what they mean--jitters--rocks and branches and trees pouring down bouncing roughly off boulders and riverbanks. Dancing to some hidden rhythm of water. Flash floods do not simply flood Claire noticed as she watched the water rising. They pulse and surge and course through the desert. They have their own rhythm, their own metabolism, their own consumption and digestion. They breathe in the dry air and expel moisture, humid vapors, a mist that steams off the surrounding banks. She thought of her grandmother. The cigarette burned down between her fingertips. And the desert going and going. 

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Emma had developed a peculiar fascination with chewing sand. It came to her mouth as a dry film licked off her lips with absent-minded desperateness. At first she had constantly pressed her lips up to gap between the boards and, gently as possible, spit it out. But then one spit whipped in the wind of a passing Chevy had flown back and hit Jack in the eye. After enduring Jack's response she explored other options and had happened on the fact that you can chew sand. You cannot, however, gargle sand as Maggie suggested. 


So from western Oklahoma onward she had been chewing sand and now, disembarked from the truck bed she violently spat it on a cactus and resolved to never do it again. Though licking her lips inside the motel room still drew into her mouth the seemingly ever-present dusty film. 


Perhaps the whole west is just one thin dusty film. Certainly the hotel room was saturated with fine grit that crept through the screens all day every time it could find a gust of wind to hitch a ride on. 


Jack had gone around the building and Emma could hear him taking to the mechanic about the weather. What this place needs Emma thought is good long afternoon shower to put the damn dust back in it's place. To put it down. 


There was nowhere to sit inside. The boys had laid Father out on the bed and Mama was giving him a glass of water and some saltines. They were talking in low voices that Emma could not make out. She went outside to help with the luggage and have a look around.


The Vida Court was, well Emma reasoned, it was better than sitting atop trundles in the back of the flatbed wedge between sweaty siblings and a mucus and blood spewing father. And that was about all that could be said of it. It was not, for instance, a ten-room farmhouse with three floors and a tornado cellar. Nor was it surrounded by endless acres of imported genuine Kentucky bluegrass with a semicircle of drooping cottonwood trees growing around the pond. There was no pond. There was no second story. There was a bathtub though, and after waiting for both Maggie and Betty to finish, she was allowed the privacy of the bathroom for twenty minutes. 


It was only after she removed her stockings that she realized how thoroughly the sand had saturated her. Or perhaps she thought briefly, perhaps my thighs have tanned through these skirts, but no it was the dusty film of Oklahoma and New Mexico that had flown up under her skirt and surrendered now to the refreshing cold of the bath water.


Emma began to hum bits of a song Mama used to sing when she was younger. Emma wished Mama would still sing to her even though she was nearly seventeen and didn't want to ask. It was no fun if you had to ask. Before the dust and the wheezing Mama used to sing all the time, just softly singing as she went about the house, without thinking of anyone hearing her, she would just sing whatever rose up inside her. Emma's earliest memories were of wanting to sing, but not knowing how. She could not dance either. Father would not let her dance, had given her a bad whipping when he caught her trying to sneak out to a dance. And then the TB laid him down, but by then everyone else already knew how to dance and they seemed to have left Emma behind, skidding wheels and a swirl of sand, bam they were gone. And now so was she. Perhaps people in Tucson danced. Father had complained that they were moving to Mexico and then gone on tirades about Mexicans and rape and a war Emma only dimly remembered from school. Lawlessness was the word she remembered from his hoarse shouting. Lawlessness was a word that made her legs tingle in the bath. Made the running water a throatier sound and her heart raced for a minute. Emma had never thought of lawlessness as a bad thing. Lawlessness did not seem to have a belt or switch and so she had no reason to fear it. After all Father had called the Elson twins lawless and godless and Emma got along with them just fine. 


He obviously couldn't see her; at least she was pretty sure he couldn't see her. She couldn't see him very clearly either, the light was fading but there was still a dark frame in a chair on the porch. She was standing in the bathtub dripping water and watching the shadow for signs of movement.


Jack pounded on the door again. "Come on Emma, I want to clean up too..."


She ignored him and continued watching the mechanic. She was hoping he would get off the porch and chop wood or do something, but there probably wasn't much call for wood this time of year. He just sat there, tipping his chair back and forth sucking on a beer that had already gone warm.


She put on a clean dress and evacuated the bungalow as fast as she could without raising undue suspicions. The sun was already gone, but the air still had traces of the heat. She walked around the cacti and was tempted to touch the thorns of a small squat variety. She reached out her hand and ran it from the center out and down the edge, careful to keep her hand moving with the hooked direction of the needles.


"So ya'll sold your farm, bought the truck and hauled your dad out here for some fresh air huh?"


The voice startled her enough that she almost leaned on the cactus for support, but at the last second realized the stupidity of doing so.


"Sorry?"


"You sold the farm, bought the truck and here you are, TB and all."


"Something like that."


"We get quite a few passing through these days..."


"Oh we're staying I believe."


"I'm Ambrose"


He extended his hand and she stepped out of the cacti and took it in her own. 


"Emma."

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The newspaper said that the wet season was coming, that leaving now was a blessing, that the hurricanes would be worse this year, that the Bahamas would persist, that tourism is a curse, that citizens of the islands must bear the curse, that every place has it's curse, that eventually all the curses will combine, that everything will be cursed, that the curse is not so bad, that loneliness is a curse, that loneliness is different than alone, that still the coffee is quite good at the cafŽ... Claire set the paper down and looked out the window at the terminal, the beads of water forming on the wings of the plane. She looked at the ring on her finger and tried to remember just when she had said yes. She knew she had not said no, but she wasn't sure she had said yes. She had been thinking about Otherness when she noticed he was on one knee which made sense now because she knew he was not traveler, the island, the plane, the waterfront hotel, all in preparation for something. She had her suspicions but she had accepted them as she accepted other premonitions, vague inklings and star crossings. Just prior to the knee dropping they walked up over a dune and were confronted with a flock of seagulls sitting on the sand. Or rather some were sitting some were standing; one was even perched on one leg. Daniel had once said he didn't enjoy traveling, the memory of which had put her in the mind of otherness. He did not like other, he liked familiar. As she had moved forward the seagulls parted, but did not fly off, they watched warily as Claire passed between them. And then he had said wait and, startled at the sound the gulls had taken off.  She paused on the sand turning over in her head a notion that perhaps otherness was not possible. That there was no other and that the very existence of an other implied it was not other at all, but part of, which leftÉ what exactly? Surprise airline tickets, tropical islands, but Claire spent her time thinking about terminals and the fascinating cant of airplane wings. He wanted to lie on the beach and she had spent her time taking walks through the arid landscape across the road from the hotel. Thinking that after five hours of flying it ought to look different than Tucson, but there it was, the same granular existence of eroded rock, thrown up by the sea and broken down slowly over time to become individual grains. Was there an irreducible limit? Was Daniel back there lying on the final forms, a great soft graveyard in front of the laughing ocean, or would eventually everything turn finer, move to silt and dust inhabiting nostrils and forming a film around her lips? Claire thought about the walk back the clichŽ juice peddler saying ya mon to obligatory tourists and then she had showered. Daniel was insistent that they go for a walk after dinner though she was not feeling romantic. Claire wanted to go home and read and fall asleep thinking about aloneness, if it should happen to exist, might she cuddle with it? Wrap it up in Butterfly kisses? Was it simply that we move through our lives alone and that aloneness convinces us that there is an other, that there is some place our aloneness can lead us, was that the delusion we were under and to think that at such a moment he decides to get down on that knee. That is something other. Daniel on his knee looking up at her with his warm smile and saccharine eyes. The crying of the gulls faded and mixed with the sounds of the surf a muddled sound. Claire looked out and watched them arcing low across the horizon, skimming the crest of the small waves. Claire started to cry because she knew that aloneness was not alone, that to find the other you first had to find yourself, that no one had ever found themselves, that the closest we get is finding ourselves in others, in public, in private, in groups, in cultures, in the rain, on the beach, in bed, in airplanes.  The gulls were behind her now circling back around and coming up from behind. She sat down on the beach next to him and took his hand in hers and stroked the sand out from between his fingers watching the gulls' circle around and return to their spot atop the dunes. The settled down in waves, the larger shape crumbling out of the air into individual birds, no longer a flock in flight. They skittered as they touched down, some of them sitting, some standing, a few again on one leg, a marvelous balancing act. When the last one had landed and settled itself and all of them turned with their beaks pointed into the wind the seemed once again a single entity, a flock. Daniel was speaking but Claire could not hear what he was saying, it could be inferred from the dramatic action involved, she left herself in a silent film, muted and trapped suddenly in her head. Trapped with ceaseless circular thoughts that created a rarified atmosphere, an unpressurized cabin that sometimes made her dizzy after making love. All she could think about was saying excuse me to a passing stranger on the stairs.


The engines beginning to wind up for the yoyo. The plane lurched and backed away from the gate. She noticed a few stubborn seagulls standing to the side of the runway while they taxied about. They didn't seem to mind the noise or the hot scream of air out the back of the jets. Claire imagined one of them taking to air and the exact wrong moment the spray of feather and blood from the whirling turbine and then Daniel's big plan undone by a seagull. She had read of such things in the newspaper. She half smiled at the thought of death by bird. I am a turbine she thought, whirling and never moving only pushing things out behind me in the hopes that by expelling them they will somehow propel me. Pushing the Bahamas now behind me, trying to rise up, wing flaps lowered, the rush of wind passing over me. Lifting.


Later she would be alone in the night. She would go to the window of another hotel in Tucson and think of the last hotel, think for quite sometime about the notion of pair bonding as her cousin called it. She would turn and look at Daniel lying asleep in the bed and know that she had never said excuse me, had never passed him on the stairs. She would stand perfectly still and let tears run down her face without sobbing, without wracking her chest and she would cry no more after that. 


She turned from the window now and looked at Daniel ensconced in the cramped airline seat. She lifted up the armrest between them, drew her body close to his. She placed his hand between hers and set them in bundle on the warm skin of her thigh. She smiled and laid her head on his shoulder to sleep.


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"Emma!" His voice half a whisper half a shout. He looked around for another stone, but when he straightened up again she was already halfway out the window. They crept through the back yard and down through the Palo Verde snarls to the banks of the Rialto. They did not dare speak until they were quite sure they were clear of the house. Once the babble of the water became stronger he stopped and she crashed into his body. He started to say something, but she smothered his mouth with a kiss.


Later lying on their backs on the blanket looking up at the stars she told him.


"Father ran off with the nurse." She propped herself up on his chest, her thin fingers retrieved the Camel from his lips and brought it to her own.


Ambrose sat up with a start. "What isÉ?"


"Mother is taking a job at the hotel. Jack is going to ask Munson about your job." Emma nuzzled against his bare chest and sighed. She flicked the cigarette off into the bushes and pulled herself up to Ambrose's lips.


Between kisses he managed to say, "Munson will hire him, I'll make sure of it."


"Of course you will." She stopped kissing for a moment and stared at his blue eyes flickering with hummingbird lashes. "You aren't going to get Malaria are you?"


"Do they have malaria in Panama?"


"Of course. And snakes and worms and all sorts of nastiness. It's a jungle you know."


"I'll be fine Emma."


"Kiss me like it's the first time you've ever kissed me." She closed her eyes and raised her eyebrows puckishly. He tried to imagine how he would kiss a stranger, but realized he would not. There is no way to kiss a stranger. Perhaps a peckish kiss on the lips. She giggled and said no not like a stranger, like me, but for the first time. Or he reasoned you could kiss a stranger roughly like the whore in Bisbee who he was pretty sure had raped him, though he hadn't minded really. But he didn't want to kiss Emma like a whore. All the people that we kiss in life he thought, so many different types of kisses, of hugs, of contact. All the meanings that can be conveyed without words. Words could stumble and fall where the brush of lips never faltered to convey, or the words he could write as his fingers dragged down the back of her linen blouse, her breasts pressed to his chest, the full weight of her on top of him sinking into him. She could feel herself collapsing, folding into the rough hair of his chest her legs entwined with his. There is a pressing and decompressing that happens during sex, some melding alchemical process she could feel rising from him and investing her with a vaporousness that lasted longer than sex itself.


Ambrose lay on the blanket watching her crouched at the rivers edge skipping rock out toward the middle like a little girl. She was wrapped in a blanket that opened up as she crouched down revealing the still milky skin of her shoulders. He marveled that after two years she still did not have so much as a hint of brown about her. They had already agreed that they would marry when he returned from Panama. He did not at that moment realize that his daughter would be at the wedding, but he would not have cared if he had known. He wanted to get married now because he felt like he could not die without being married. He felt he would be missing some essential part of experience if he were to simply march off as so many of friends were ready to do. Most of them glad in fact that have the excuse, to regularly use the excuse at the dance hall parties. One more before I go darlingÉ Ambrose felt sorry for them without knowing why. He watched the girl skipping rocks by the river. She looked luminous and reminded him of the stellar calendar Munson had pinned up at the garage. Photographs taken from a telescope, the first of their kind Munson claimed. Ambrose sat and stared at it for hours when Munson wasn't around. He had memorized every description. He could even find Orion's belt. He glanced up at the sky and could dimly see it through the branches of the tree.  He remembered the first day and burning eyes that he had to turn away from, but now those eyes seem more of glow than the piercing he had originally perceived. He thought of them like giant nebulas, like the stars of Orion's belt, especially the reddish one at the top. She yelled something from the edge of the river that he could not understand. He stood up still naked and walked toward her.

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Claire's grandfather's voice startled her.


"I heard you gave those up," he smiled.


"I say a lot of thingsÉ"


"So do I, mind if I bum one?"


She hesitated, "it's not going to give your heart attack or anything is it?"


He shrugged. "I don't know, but it's about time for me to be getting along anyway, so let me live a little before I go."


She gave him her cigarette and fished out another for herself. She studied his face as he smoked, wondering what how it looked, young and smooth, before eighty years spent in and out of the desert sun.  With some difficulty borne of age he managed to lower himself to the ground and sat down next to her. He began talking about Gamma and the river and things that had happened years ago, but Claire could not hear him. Try as she might she could not follow the words and instead could only wonder what oldness was made of, what shape death takes as it draws nearer and nearer. Or perhaps it takes no clearer shape than what she could see from her own thirty years, perhaps it's life that has sharper shape when death approaches and I will be caught between them unsure where to run. She watched a skink darting in and out the rocks and shade at the edge of the tree. The fern frond leaves of the Mesquite dropped and seemed to want to head toward the ground, or perhaps only knew that it was futile to try and go up in this heat. Up where it is only hotter she reasoned. If life begins in pleasure and ends in pain is it therefore necessarily futile? Is it just an expansive joke, me being the product of endless strangers' pleasure, rooted in their bellies and born through their legs only to end in pain? And what? Along the way move to feel my own pleasure and bear out strangers of my own, slowly plodding toward the pain. She thought of Aldus Huxley and his anesthetized hallucinatory suicide. Was that cheating? Was the pain necessary? Was it still possible to die with grace, naturally, without the infest of disease, that later day stranger come to roost itself like so many passenger pigeons returned home? She thought of the seagulls standing on the leeward side of the dune. They did not fly until they heard the voice, until the words were in the air, that was simply too much for them, they had to leave. Is that why they slap the baby's bottom, that sound to drive off the seagulls, the pigeons, to send them packing out into the world until latter when they had gathered up their messages, the spare change of phone calls never placed and came back bearing cancer and heart attacks and the cornucopia of disease that waits for me.


Claire heard him now indistinct at first, she heard her grandmother's name and knew that grandfather did not mention it often; it startled her to hear it. She thought of her grandmother's pain, swept up in the rising river, the boulders, she knew from whispered family stories that the body was never found. That the desert had claimed her for its own. Gamma's birds returned home to roost bearing such messages as to forever wipe her from the face of the earth, until she existed only as dim memories repeated by her mother and her aunt and now her grandfather talking of Gamma's love for the river, how she had always wanted to be in the river and how it reminded her of a pond she swam in as a child before the dust and the sickness of her father had come back to roast and how perhaps that was her way of seeing different birds come back into the barn, she did not wantÉ She knew Claire. He is looking her straight in the eyes and repeating it. Their eyes met and held for a moment, his moist tiny universes floating in a saline ether with faint but visible stars beginning to glow behind them.

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The ceiling fan was spinning slowly like the reel of a tape machine or a movie projector except that it was old and broken and to get it to work at all, Ambrose had reversed to drive mechanism in the motor. His once skilled mechanical hands had turned clumsy and slow. It was not until he had the motor back together that he realized his error. Now it played backwards, rewinding, pulling air up instead of blowing it down. He lay on the bed in near darkness watching a fly that had been bussing about him all day. It was now entering its death throws, or seemed to be. It reminded him of the cockroaches on the troop ship steaming past New Guinea. He watched the fly die slowly, taking a few staggering steps then resting, staggering some more. He enjoyed the fly's motion much more than the memories of the flying New Guinea cockroaches which went through a similar motion, but with less grace. The cockroaches had a frantic clinging quality to their death walk that had made them endearing at the time, stuck as he was, treated like a cockroach. But now the thought of the motion seemed to him distant and inappropriate. He enjoyed much more the seemingly sublime subtlety of the fly, less a stagger, nothing in its motion was so heroic as a stagger, more of a final stroll, stopping now to wipe it's eyes with it's little fingerlike antennae, not altogether different from what Ambrose might do if he still took walks. But he did not so he lay and watched the ceiling fan rewind.


The troop ship had been infested with cockroaches. At night you could hear them beating themselves against the faded dull lime colored steal of the hull. They would chew at the tough salty skin of your fingers and feet until you woke up nearly unable to walk, though some of that was due to the varieties of tropical funguses the men had acquired, all of which kept Ambrose and his medical kit fairly busy during the day. He remembered at the time he hated the fact that everyone else sat around all day, but now he recognized that he had retained his sanity because his mind was occupied. And of course there had been no ceiling fan, rewinding or otherwise, just the deathly still tropical air and crazy cockroaches battering themselves against the walls until they broke their wings and began to limp about on the floor like characters from Beckett novel.


The sun was gone now only a dull bluish light visible around the edges of the curtains which Ambrose kept drawn all day to cut the heat. The fly was wondering off toward the end of bed where without warning it begin to slip and once moving did not have the strength to stop itself, or perhaps just decided that anything was better than this and it slid out of sight into the black depths between the bed and wall. How beautiful he thought watching it disappear, to just slide like that, just slide right out of existence. The water that came to his eyes was not for her anymore, but for himself. For having remained behind, for having to perpetuate everything out of some duty, some servitude to forces he could not understand, could not make sense of and long ceased to care about. He heard the first splattering sounds of rain hit the windowpane, muffled splatters dulled by the heavy draperies, which he was too lazy to pull back even now that the heat had begun to abate. He remembered standing on the railing of the ship, under the cover of the upper deck walkway watching the water pour off the side in sheets, holding the papers in his hand still though he had read them a thousand times in the two days since they had called him up to the command deck and solemnly handed them to him. Some lost legs, some arms, some hands and feet, some guts, some organs, some sanity, some love. It was the last of these he could not help. There were no tools or medicines in his pack for them. His was not a dear John letter, he wished that it was, he deeply wished that it was something so simple as falling out of love, finding someone else, these things would fit the shape of war. But he got a War Department letter. A change of billet. A plane ticket home. As soon as the tub reached New Guinea the war for him was lost already. Two days outside of port he decided that indeed he did not matter either and as discreetly as possible he stepped out into the rain and climbed up the deck railing. Below the sea was pitching softly, above the first stars already showing. He had it in mind to let the ship decide, to let the bashing insanity of the cockroaches, the randomness of their lives which had taken over the world completely, decide whether he returned or not, but before he had the chance to test randomness the ship pitch violently away and he was sent flying back hitting his head against steel bulk head. He still remembered the one inane thought he mustered before passing out. I did not know you could see Orion this far south.


Lying in bed at night he watched the fan turn and thought it over and over again. I did not know. That was what gathered meaning over the years. Orion remained incidental. Ambrose had come to believe that knowing was not experience, nor abstraction. He was not in fact sure that he knew what knowing was at all. He still did not know. Knowing had careened around him a roulette ball bouncing on a wheel or maybe bouncing all over the table like a cue ball or maybe knowing has nothing to do with balls, maybe its more like time-lapse footage of clouds on the Discovery Channel, puffs form and dissipate and form anew and on and on. What it was he had not know at that moment was incidental, trivial and nothing compared to what he did not know now.
 
Ambrose stood and wiped the seat of his pants. With some grunting and difficulty he ducked out from beneath the thorny branches of the Mesquite Tree. He looked at Claire sitting with her back toward him, leaning against the trunk of the tree, only strands of her black hair really visible and even those blending confusingly with the black bark of the tree. He wanted to say something, but wasn't sure what it was. He wanted there to be some closure, some satisfactions, but knew there was neither available. So he said nothing and turned back toward the house hobbling and crouched from age.


Claire watched him go and reached into her hip pocket for another cigarette. The water was beginning to spill over the banks. They would be running the ticker tape at the bottom of television. Flash flood warning in effect. Tomorrow the newspaper would say that perhaps someone had died, that the desert is a curse, that the desert is barren and a curse, that a new golf course is going to be built on the hillside, that perhaps the treat of flooding is the price we pay for sunshine, that coffee is still good atÉ Claire stood up from the rock and started to follow the train closer to the river. She knelt beside the lapping edge and listened to rumble of the deeper waters. She reached behind her and pulled her shirt down over her back. She smoothed the creases of her pants and turned to walk back to the house.