Recognition

When I saw her instantly I felt that I had known her before. We smiled at each other across the small ballroom. The lift of her eyebrows, the look in her eyes—why else would she have smiled? She knew me as well. Yet I couldn’t place her, couldn’t remember a woman with red hair, and when I weaved my way to where she was standing by the crudité, she had vanished.

I took another glass of wine from a passing server, vaguely surprised she hadn’t waited. Then one of the experts who had been on that afternoon’s panel beckoned to me, demanding to know what I made of his ludicrous theory about the recent discovery of the bodies. I made some hackneyed excuse and slipped away. Of course, he only wanted to compare my work with his, in hopes that I felt my theories were being threatened, which would validate his feeble cogitations. If it weren’t for the opportunity to tour the dig, I wouldn’t even entertain sequestering myself in a roomful of small, tedious men in such a far-flung place.

On the second floor, I stood at the window of this unconvincing attempt of a hotel and looked out at the primordial red mesa with its vertical layers of white and red sandstone and the unquenchable man-made desert spreading at its feet. I went to the desk, scanning my notes from the panel, unable to contemplate even outlining my article on submerged sectarian movements. Nor could I imagine how logging the panel’s pedantic minutiae would add anything substantial to my book. For a moment, I longed to be back in that wonderful period of productive isolation two years ago where I kept myself alive on dried cranberries. But inspiration would have to wait until I viewed the dig in the morning. I was, after all, the unofficial guest of honor.

I slipped off my shoes and lay on top of the duvet, musing instead about the red-haired woman. Brown freckles, green eyes, a round face, lushly pretty—none of that struck me as familiar. What I recognized was located in her expression, her smile. If only I could have heard her voice, I felt certain I would’ve been able to place her. I went idly through a few names, students I’d had, colleagues I’d dated, but no. I yawned. It wouldn’t do to stay up obsessing over a nameless woman when I needed to be at my sharpest in the morning. I resolved to find her during tomorrow’s antiquated complimentary breakfast.

As I rolled onto my side, the generator kicked off. The room went fatally dark and heat crept in. I sat bolt upright. Through the window, I fancied I could make out the dig’s floodlights, rows of small tents glowing in the night. But indeed, that was impossible—it was much too far away.

It was getting hotter and the blasted windows didn’t open. I peeled off my blazer and unbuttoned my shirt, feeling the breath starting to stack in my chest. I took a sip of rainwater from the glass on the bedside table and could distinguish voices in the hall, then the generator clicked into rhythm and there was a wash of cold air, light.

In the morning, I woke hours before breakfast and wandered the hotel’s maroon lobby wondering why it had been done in a style contemporary fifty years ago. Saturated in mauve, gold and beige, it tried to exude the confidence of a gleaming sterility, simply unattainable in this day and age. The front desk was curiously unmanned, but I managed to scare up a cup of coffee and stepped outside, walking past the landscaped cacti. A valet getting into a jeep glanced at me. Guests weren’t supposed to venture beyond the drive without water or a guide. Or a gun, some said, as if the doomers still eking out an existence here were lurking, violently resentful at our curiosity. But it was the desert itself that offered hostility. Particularly, the man-made desert. Or that was my perspective on radically consumed spaces. Bibb’s advocating for a return to fear, was what my detractors said. A gallingly shallow misreading of my work, but I was used to it, and what was wrong with a healthy dose of fear? If one feared the right thing, that was.

I went back in for a refill and when I returned, I came upon the red-haired woman standing alone at the edge of the drive, a conference brochure in hand. As I approached, she turned and I said, “You look familiar.”

She stared at me with her rather wide eyes and precise gaze, and I was oddly reminded that some female spiders eat their mates after copulation.

“It’s not a line,” I told her.

Then she laughed and seemed softer, with a hint of the maternal. “You really don’t remember?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.” I smiled. “Lee Bibb.” I put out my hand.

She took it, holding rather than shaking it. “Sydney Martin. But that’s my married name. We knew each other before that.”

Married. For some unfathomable reason I was instantly depressed, though we had never dated, I was peculiarly sure of it.

“I’m divorced now,” Sydney said as if reading my mind. “Well separated, it’s almost finalized. I’ve kept my married name. I’ve had it so long. I got married very young.” This last sentence took her away and I too began to picture her very young, though I could make out gray coming in at her temples.

“Did we know each other in school? I think I’d remember if I knew you at university.”

“No, even before that.” She smiled, quite mischievous now.

I was thoroughly mystified. Could she have been as far back as the orphanage? My time there was relatively misty, and for a smattering of months, utterly blank. Not to imply I had been mistreated, neglected would be a better word. However, anyone could’ve read the details of my experience in one of my interviews. Perhaps we’d never met. Perhaps her name wasn’t even Sydney.

“I presume this is what brought you?” I gestured to the photograph of the dig on the front of her brochure.

“Isn’t it what brought everybody?” she said, managing not to sound flippant, and we both looked in the direction of the dig with a kind of reverence.

“It is a rare discovery,” I said. “Perfectly preserved bodies apparently.”

“They knew it would happen to them,” she said in a positively dreamy tone.

I glanced at her half-closed eyes and was slightly repelled. “They had warnings certainly. There’d actually been a storm the week before, not of that magnitude, but still formidable.”

To start, the community had consisted of three families who wanted to live off the grid after the war: the Corbins, Wilkes, and Ashes. Together, they bought the semiarid land dirt cheap, set up tents, and began gardening and building homes, believing they’d gotten a bargain, unaware that the land, which had long been scalped and plugged with pesticides, was turning into a desert.

In the beginning, there was enough in the water table to hold a lawn, some trees, and eventually they set up solar panels to harness the sun. Apparently, it was Dale Corbin who first sought to move away from the alternative homesteader ideals they’d loosely nourished and opened up the community to moneyed families who wanted to escape but had a nostalgic longing for playgrounds, pools, and paved roads. For Corbin, it turned out that the community was less about religion or sovereignty or major collapse as it was a way to realize a suburban utopia.

After fifteen years, there were forty-seven people. In thirty-five, there were close to two hundred souls. But by then, the water they could barely afford was no longer for sale. It was a matter of time before the land dried out. Most decamped, but those who stayed evidently became more fanatical. Though to be fair, there weren’t many places that would’ve willingly let them in. In the end, it was reported that there were roughly thirty-six people left—plus or minus a child.

“But of course,” I told Sydney, “hardly anyone imagines disaster will befall them.”

“I’ve read your article on the Corbins,” she said. “Help me understand: why only write about them and not the Ashes or Wilkes?”

“The Corbins were the first to come, last to leave. Ultimately, they had the bigger arc, unlike the Ashes and Wilkes clans who were a fairly dour lot.”

“I disagree. All of their contributions built the community and should be valued,” she said.

“Ah, and here I thought you were a kindred spirit.”

“I think I am. But you come across as obsessed with the Corbins.”

It wasn’t a new criticism. I’d even heard people at the conference calling me a Corbinite—such puerile designations already cropping up. “I admit I’m fascinated by the tension between those who became considerably entrepreneurial, or sort of low-level cornucopians, versus those who were Utopian survivalists with your standard back-to-the-land composting toilets—not to imply there weren’t those in between.”

She considered me with those bewitching green eyes. “Have you been here before?”

I wasn’t sure why she asked, since the dig had only just opened. “No,” I said.

“I’ve been coming back here for years, long before they built this hotel. Don’t you think it’s beautiful?” She turned to face the desert.

I didn’t think it was beautiful. Nor would I have described it as such. It was too powerful for beauty.

The armored convoys pulled up and I could tell that despite their geriatrically sized sunglasses, the sordidly muscular guides were annoyed that we were standing unattended. Suddenly aware of the time, I excused myself and returned to my room to change. As I buttoned up my shirt, I mused that Sydney had never told me where we’d met, she’d managed to thoroughly evade the question.

Chad looked nothing like I’d been imagining. For one, he was much older than he’d sounded, on the short side with large watery blue eyes. He had donned a straw hat that could have been a sombrero and seemed to be constantly gorging on a toothpick. This was the man who had discovered the dig, and if rumor were to be believed, he had opened the hotel in hopes of a tourism boom once the dig became public. Bit of a crass move, but while others believed that the community had long since fled, Chad realized that a few diehards had tried to wait out the cataclysmic dust storm and had uncovered their preserved bodies.

“I’m a big fan.” He shook my hand with clammy ardor as we met outside of the largest square of the site near the remains of a shed that had once housed the community’s livestock. “I’ve been following your work ever since you found the recording of that underground commune—that was amazing, really masterful.” He led me over to the mob of academics assembled around a wheelbarrow.

In their midst, the anxious desire to view the bodies was amplified, and the scene suddenly struck me as rather ghoulish. I was gratified that Sydney was not among us, although I surmised this was because a select few had been invited, conference attendees being virtually the lowest rung.

Chad, briefly removing his sombrero to reveal a bald dome, marched us assiduously down the dirt-hewn stairs and we descended into the site, which was roughly the size of a small town square. He chummily insisted I be next to him and as we walked, pointed into the various squares identifying animal bones, battered remnants of plastic water bottles, and scattered metal pipes—relics of the community’s modest plumbing.

What was in the last square was simply extraordinary: an unearthed house, its boards peeling white paint; then to its left, an empty inground pool, the blue tiles misted with sand; and finally, across what had presumably been their main street was an empty diner, its floor partially filled with drifts of sand, the occasional red stool peeking out, and the jagged edges of what was left of its windows winking in the ruthless sun. Amidst the collective approbation, I massaged my temples, feeling a bleak headache beginning behind my eyes.

Chad motioned us inside where tufts of sagebrush and shale rock had broken through a floor littered with bits of rotted ceiling and fallen beams. “The house,” he told us, “was one of the earliest built, and used, we believe, as their community center. Later structures, like their houses were much more architecturally advanced. If you look at the back of the pantry door in what was their kitchen, you can see evidence of a wonderful tradition where they recorded the children’s heights over the years with lead. Some of the names still remain.”

Here I noted that unlike the scholars, Chad and his coterie of guides acted as if this were a military operation. They were visibly armed, and with the exception of Chad’s sombrero, in soldierly garb.

“Is there more than what you’ve dug up here? Or is this the bulk of it?” I asked, feeling a tight nausea in the pit of my stomach. I wondered if it was something I ate, then remembered that I hadn’t eaten this morning.

“Do you think you’ve found all of the bodies?” asked the paunchy sycophant who’d tried to corner me yesterday.

“Absolutely, but we think there’s much more to be found,” Chad said, unable to contain a significantly self-satisfied smile. “We’ve been spending most of our time preserving the bodies.”

A surge of heat flared up the back of my neck. In vain, I tried to take deep cooling breaths. But felt myself starting to drift, dark edges crackling at the corners of my consciousness, then I slipped and was a boy walking alongside my bike, the chain having slipped off yet again. I could feel my child’s frustration like steam from the road after a summer rain. I was wheeling my bike home along our main street, the road’s black-gray scarring the gold grass. The center of town was starkly deserted, the general store closed and the sidewalks empty, though in the distance I rather thought I could hear other children playing in the community pool. As I passed the dry fountain in the town square, I was transfixed by its stone serpent coiled in the middle with an open mouth, its ominous red tongue bleached pink from the sun. I was longing for shadow, for a glass of water, for a mother’s touch on my stinging knee—the most immediate of balms.

Outside of the house the grass was dead, even the poor succulents had curled in on themselves. I heard a bell tolling in the distance as I opened the front door, calling for my mother, the chilled air swallowing my child’s voice. I walked through the sunlit living room and into the kitchen where I found a mug in portentous shards on the floor.

“Mom? Dad?” I wandered up the stairs but only heard the perpetually sucking sound of the air-conditioning. In my bedroom, I washed my hands in a bowl of water and dabbed the water with a finger over my cracked lips. Then downstairs, the door slammed shut and someone came panting up the stairs. Quite soon, my mother appeared in the partially open doorway, her eyes pink and swollen.

“Here you are,” she said, coming in and taking my face in her sonorous hands. “I thought I told you to be home an hour ago?” Then she let me go, her mind full of something else, but she continued to speak rather automatically. “You had me worried—I was out looking for you.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said too cheerfully, wiping her nose. “We’re going for that trip. Get your bag.”

“I unpacked it.”

“What? Why?” She seemed momentarily aghast.

“I had to use it for school.”

“Pack it again. Now.”

“Where’s Dad?”

She suddenly shook me roughly by the shoulders. “Just do as I said.” Then she was gone.

“Can I still go to Mark’s birthday party?” I asked.

“Five minutes,” she called back.

However, two minutes later, she was in my room in sneakers and a backpack. I’d only just located my bag and slowly unzipped it. She snatched it from me, haphazardly stuffing clothes inside. “Downstairs,” she said.

Before we stepped outside, she had me crouching down with her in the foyer while she peered through the front window, then herded me down the driveway.

“I don’t want to.” I tried to get loose.

“Humor me,” she said, staring grimly ahead.

“Lee?” Chad had a hand on my forearm. “Are you all right?”

I turned and looked at him. “I was . . . I was dreaming.”

“Your eyes were open,” he said.

I became aware that the entire group was staring rather blankly at me. “I’ve been feeling nauseated.” Though I was confounded myself, something not dissimilar had happened before while I was doing field research on the collapse of a literally underground cult. I’d felt faint in one of their tunnels and the annihilating darkness invoked an otherworldly hallucination. A peril of the job.

“Okay,” said Chad, glancing at one of the guides. “Let’s get you somewhere you can sit down and recoup.” He smiled at the group and handed me his canteen. “Hangovers and the desert definitely don’t mix.” Everyone gave the usual parsimonious social laugh.

One of the guides stepped forward and began leading the group through the salient features of the white house. Chad remained with me until they were out of earshot. “Look man, I don’t want to unveil the bodies without you there. Like I said when we first spoke, I really dug your article on the Corbins—you nailed their mentality. I almost felt like it was a guiding voice telling me where to look.”

It was seldom that I was at a loss for words, but I was floundering now. I only wanted to get out of the dig and lie down. “I wouldn’t want you to change your schedule on my account. Do carry on without me. I only need to step above ground for a few minutes at most.”

“Listen Lee,” he paused, “can I call you Lee?”

My eyes met his massive orbs. “I prefer Bibb.”

“Bibb, we can totally wait. We want you to be there, for the article. I want our debut to be something powerful.”

“It’s more of an essay actually, but that’s irrelevant. At any rate, I’ll be back shortly.” I struggled to sound rational but my desire to escape was becoming unbearable.

“Sure, sure.” He clapped me too forcefully on the back and gave some sort of complex hand signal to one of the guides.

Above the dig, I felt I could breathe, though in every direction I saw nothing but unending stretches of scrub and sand and this began to overpower me. Since everyone was apparently still on-site, it was reasonably unlikely that I was being observed so I sat down, not caring what damage the dust might do to my slacks. I let my chin drop to my chest and put my hands over my burning eyes. I knew I must put a stop to these spells before I garnered the undesired reputation of wilting. Yet it struck me as bizarre that I would dream (remember?) my mother and that the narrative would be one of flight. Was there indeed a time we were forced to run away? And who was Mark?

“It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?”

I looked up to find Sydney above me, her hair on fire in the sun. “What are you doing here?” I said.

“I told you, I’ve been coming here. You could call me Chad’s first guide, when guides were just people to show you the way and not thugs.”

“Old friends then?” I joked.

She didn’t respond to this and instead looked quite steely. “Why aren’t you down there? Isn’t this the moment you’ve been waiting for? The great unveiling.”

It was a rare occasion that I would willingly conduct myself in a manner I knew to be pathetic before a powerfully attractive being, but without further ado, I stuck my head between my knees and found that my deodorant had long since failed me. “Actually, I’m feeling under the weather, and honestly, I could care less about this silly article when I should be concentrating on the last chapters of my book, which isn’t principally based on this community but submerged secular communities at large. I’m on a deadline after all.” I kept attempting to take deeper breaths but had the impression that there was less and less room in my chest.

“Breathe out,” Sydney said. “Then you can let the air in.”

I exhaled and felt the tightness rippling over my face leave. “Thank you.” I sighed.

“I wonder why you’re here,” she said.

“Sydney”—suddenly recalling my hallucination—“I had a dream of sorts. No doubt influenced by my research on this place—I really am dehydrated.”

She gave a thick, irresistible laugh. “What were you doing in your dream?”

“Running away. With my mother.” Something tickled my throat and I coughed.

“Some say that childhood is a dream.”

“Not anyone who’s lived in an orphanage.” I got to my feet and dusted off my slacks. “What was strange was that there was no father in this dream.”

“Do you remember where you know me from?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Soon,” she said soothingly and somehow I felt that this was precisely the case.

We walked to the bottom of the site where everyone was waiting. The feeling that I might become faint again clung to me, and I went so far as to consider holding Sydney’s hand, or asking her to take my arm, lest I keel over.

“Bibb!” Chad rushed over, slowing as he recognized Sydney. “You two know each other?”

I glanced at her serene virtually noble expression. “We met this morning.”

Chad did not precisely appear pleased with this admission. I wasn’t altogether certain that he wouldn’t bar her way as he stood there with his arms folded, a guide looming at his side. “You can come if you want,” he finally said. I decided I would skewer him in my article.

“I know,” she replied.

Chad ignored this and ushered me to the front of the group outside of the diner. The moment we entered, the air changed, as if signaling some disruption in time for in front of us were roughly thirty spontaneously desiccated bodies under gauze.

One by one, Chad’s team unveiled the bodies whose skin had thinned to a brown parchment clinging to bone, each face arguably distinct, and some, if not all of their features visible. As my eye traveled down the rows, I fancied that the expression of one had something of the familiar about it. I stooped over her, close enough to touch and see the places where her skull showed through. My traitorous pulse began to quicken.

As far as I was aware, Chad was watching me with interest, so I quietly backed away from the open mouths and cringing postures to where Sydney stood near the entrance, not surveying our fascinated shock but seeming stricken. I took out my notepad, pretending to write. She stared at the bodies, looking like she might fold in on herself. I looked at the floor, or more specifically, a trail of ants on the floor to avoid looking at either her or the bodies. Soon I moved toward the door, my vision trembling, smiling and waving Chad over.

“Great work here. I’m wondering how I might get back to the hotel? I’ve just had a spectacular idea for the article and want to get it all down.” I dug my nails into my palm in a valiant effort to stay upright.

Chad’s face lit up and I fled.

Back in my room, I flopped onto the bed, trying to summon that scene in the driveway with exactitude. The sun was going down, leaving the desert black and splashing the walls with a lavalike light. I was strangely unable to think of much of anything until stars filled the darkening sky like shattered glass. Chilled, I wrapped myself in the duvet and sat cocooned by the window. When I closed my eyes, I could conjure the sliver of a vision: I saw my mother and myself at the end of our street joined by another woman and a little girl. Without speaking, we children agreed that something bad was transpiring—the presence of another child only served to seal the certainty of badness.

“Did anyone see you?” my mother asked her mother.

The little girl’s mother shook her head. “They’ve probably noticed we’re not there by now.”

“Nobody will come looking right away,” my mother said. “It’s not far. Keep walking.”

The other woman looked up at the sky. “We’d better hurry.”

When I looked back at our house, the sky was so dark it had put the sun out.

I jumped. A knock at the door. Through the eyehole, I spied Sydney. I threw off the duvet and quickly dressed again.

“Was your hair always red?” I asked as I let her in.

“I dye it,” she said and closed the door behind her. “Why aren’t you down there celebrating with everyone?”

“After beholding those bodies, revelry doesn’t quite feel seemly.” I moved my papers from the room’s only chair.

“You feel sorry for them?” she asked.

“Their final emotion was one of terror.” I turned and looked at her. “I’m decidedly haunted by the children, and perhaps their mothers, holding them in that last, frightful moment.”

“But those mothers chose to stay, forced their children to stay even when they knew a deadly dust storm was coming.”

“You’re right, strictly speaking. Most of them knew the storm’s magnitude, but they didn’t know what that would mean. Please, have a seat.”

She sat, drawing her legs underneath her and twisting her long red braid in one hand. “We have something remarkable in common,” she said, folding her hands in her lap.

Despite the fact that I’d been waiting to hear these very words, I was compelled to walk to the window and pretend to look out in order to hide my expression.

“We know what it is to survive the end of the world as we know it. To be abandoned.”

Somewhat composed, I turned to look at her. “Where do I know you from?”

“You already know,” she said.

“The orphanage,” was my pithy reply.

“Yes.” The dip of her head made me think of tulips, or the stem of a tulip. Hardy yet graceful. “Let me ask you something, Lee,” she said. “Why do you advocate for a return to fear?”

“A most popular misinterpretation. I discuss the value of the emotion. Similar to pain, it is telling us something.”

Echoing my earlier gesture, she gazed out at the night sky. “I’ve always come back here. I was old enough to remember leaving here, walking out of town until we could see the canyon. I remember how frantically my mother started digging in the ground. I had no idea what the hell she was doing until I saw the steel hatch. Then we climbed down the ladder and there it was: a huge concrete bunker stuffed with supplies for the end of the world.” She smiled. “And when I asked her why are we hiding here? She told me that the biggest dust storm in our history was coming, and I was not impressed. I mean, I was a kid and dust storms had been happening ever since I could remember. They were scary and dirty but that was the way things were, you know?”

I sat on the corner of the bed. “But what about your father? Did you abandon him to this potentially lethal dust storm?”

“I don’t know the exact details. All I remember is that he was a Corbin and the Corbins wanted to wait it out, they forced the whole community to wait it out. So she took off with me and another mom and her kid.”

I felt the oddest sensation in my limbs like an engine had turned on in my bones. “And the other child, he was a boy?”

“Yes,” she said, just like I knew she would.

“And he ended up in the orphanage like you?”

“Yes.” Her eyes met mine. “You have to help me.”

When I closed my eyes I could see a black ocean wave of dust rolling toward me. “Yes,” I said. I was that boy.

There was only one guide on duty, since everyone else was making merry at the hotel. Once I reiterated whom I was, he was relatively happy to let us in. I was, after all, nothing but a harmless scholar, pomposity my only defense.

Outside of the diner, as one might expect, I hesitated before subjecting myself to the morbid horror of the bodies. But once Sydney went in, I had to follow, keeping my gaze as well as I could away from their petrified faces, but every once in a while my eyes strayed. The half melted children were particularly disturbing. Sydney’s dissent was valid: the community’s bodies didn’t truly merit this sort of archaeological preservation. Once Chad had ascertained how they died, then they should have been interred, but these sort of hermetic sects provoked a gruesome fascination, as well I knew.

“Did you know any of them?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I broached the question as delicately as possible. “Your parents?”

She shook her head then pointed at the nearest body. “But that was my uncle, and the swimming instructor. I feel bad that I wasn’t a better student. I always gave the poor guy a hard time.”

“What happened to your mother? The mothers?”

“No one was supposed to open the bunker door once the dust storm started because the place would fill with sand and we’d be buried alive. I remember my mom repeating that nine or ten times. They’d just put us in sleeping bags and given us a pack of cards. It was fun—like we were on a camping trip, until we heard this banging that kept getting louder and louder. We kids begged to know what it was, but our mothers wouldn’t answer, they only exchanged looks. Then the hatch flew open and I saw my father’s head. At first, I thought he’d come to join us and I was happy, but pretty soon it was clear that he’d come to take us back. It was crazy—sand was whipping round the room, and outside the sky was howling. Our mothers rushed up the stairs and forced him out and when the hatch closed behind them, the bunker went dark.” She paused, swallowing until her voice came back to her.

“We waited and waited for our mothers. We waited until we couldn’t breathe. When we finally dared to open the hatch, there was no sign of anyone, the town, or any living thing.” She looked away from the bodies and at me.

I knew then why my childhood was so fragmented—the trauma of losing my mother, and in such a manner. To have her hands tucking me into a sleeping bag one moment and then vanishing the next. It was interesting to see how differently Sydney and I, two children of the same traumatic event, had turned out. Her reaction was to return to the site. Whereas I, by forgetting it, had sought to catalog the tragic flaw of other sects.

“It feels so true,” I said.

“It is true,” she said.

I was exquisitely light-headed, barely able to breathe let alone think. “What do we do now?”

“It’s a space that needs to be laid to rest. The land itself needs to heal, to be away from humans.”

I nodded. I’d never felt prompted to take part in anything approaching the sacred. I’d always admired the impulse, or at least been fascinated by it, but never belonged to it.

She opened her bag and showed me a hoard of lighter fluid and matches. “I’m sure we’re being filmed, so we’ll have to be quick, and of course, they’ll know it was us, which means we’ll have to hide out in the desert for a while. I have a place we can stay. But if you’re going to do this with me, you know your career will be over. Think about that.”

There was a profound strumming in my chest. “Perhaps I can be a sort of radical fugitive scholar,” I joked helplessly.

I reached in for a bottle of lighter fluid and solemnly doused the bodies while Sydney headed for the white house. When I threw the match, the flame spread faster than thought, fracturing the bodies’ delicate shells housing their bones. Momentarily blinded by the light, an unsubstantial thing thick as dream, I thought of how I loved and feared my mother’s audacity.

Then I heard a flare burst in the air and Sydney rushed back in out of breath. “We better get out of here,” she said. “I don’t trust that guide not to shoot at us.” She grabbed my hand and we ran up the stairs of the site and toward our jeep to head into the unspeakably vast desert like we had so many years before. Then I had been so afraid, but now when I heard the screech and roar of a convoy coming upon us, I felt enveloped by the purity of a true act.

Chad pulled in front of us with two of his adherents and hopped out waving a gun, his sombrero gone and his eyes more compellingly massive than I thought possible. “What have you done?” he screamed.

“Was I a Corbin?” I asked Sydney. Despite the mayhem, or because of it, I desperately needed to know.

“Calm down,” she said to Chad, putting her hands up. “What’s done is done.”

“Or an Ashe?” I asked.

She looked over at me. “What?”

“Was I an Ashe? Quick!”

She stared at me as if frightened. “What do you mean? Lee . . . you were never here.”

But the dark heat was so dreadfully familiar, especially when she tried to run, as was the suffocating silence after the bullets, from so many guns, at such close range, had ripped into her lovely face, and too my cry at the agony only a man-made death could give.