4.

I packed the car and drove out east through Twentynine Palms with its marine barber shops and sad bars and massage parlors and I kept driving into the wide and unvaried basin that hangs between the Pinto and Sheep Hole Mountains and that some clever soul thought to name Wonder Valley. Despite recent upticks in its hipness quotient, Wonder Valley remains nearly as sparsely inhabited as it was in the late seventies, when two jets from the base missed their targets and dropped no fewer than thirty-two five-hundred-pound bombs there, causing precisely zero casualties. I headed north over the Sheep Holes and kept going, down into the dry bed of Bristol Lake gleaming white with salt, past the evaporation canals for the salt mines there, the low cone of a long-extinct volcano hulking in the distance. I stopped for a soda in the near-abandoned town of Amboy and asked for ice, but the old man behind the counter at the gas station said he had none because there was no water there. I kept driving, straight through the Mojave National Preserve, past the high, white, almost Saharan dunes in Kelso and through a wide forest of Joshua trees, threadier and taller than the ones I’ve been familiar with. The sky was enormous and striped with low clouds, the narrow highway spooling off before me as I drove.

Just before the Nevada line, I hit Interstate 15 and almost crashed the car. The sun had disappeared behind the hills and north of the highway I could make out a sprawling grid of solar panels, their right angles jarring but recognizable, at least. Beside them was something I could not understand: three high and windowless black structures, like watchtowers in a concentration camp built by aliens, or for aliens. The towers were surrounded by white, amorphous shapes, low to the ground. They were glowing, emitting an almost blinding white light. Later I did some googling and learned that it was a “solar-thermal plant”: a vast array of mirrors arranged in concentric circles, directing concentrated beams of sunlight at the towers to boil the water within them. The white shapes were the reflections of clouds sitting on the surface of the desert. The blinding light was the sun. It had already set, but the mirrors, at a higher altitude than the highway, were still catching its rays.

Across the Nevada line, I passed an outlet mall and two casinos amid the creosote scrub. One was done up in Old West kitsch, the other in turreted Disneyesque fairy-tale medieval. A monorail connected them, and a roller coaster looped between the hotel towers and an artificial mountain. Real mountains looked on from the horizon on all sides. Behind the casinos I could just make out a sprawl of pink stone buildings and concrete guard towers blurred behind barbed wire and chain link. A prison. Finally Las Vegas took shape over the horizon, announcing itself in golden lights and billboards advertising more casinos, marijuana dispensaries, housing developments (THE ULTIMATE MASTER-PLANNED COMMUNITY), Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club and various competing strip joints, a racetrack where you could pay to DRIVE YOUR DREAM CAR TODAY, personal injury lawyers, erectile dysfunction therapy (PERFORM AT YOUR BEST), a shooting range where you could fire a .50-caliber machine gun for twenty-nine dollars.

It was dark by the time I reached the Strip and the casinos and the golden megalith of the Rhino’s local hotel. The GPS guided me through miles of industrial neighborhoods, or what had once been industrial neighborhoods, the factories and warehouses converted into weed shops and smoke shops and gun shops, twenty-four-hour liquor stores, tattoo parlors, massage parlors, everything lit in screaming neon. Eventually I found the apartment I had rented sight unseen, a furnished studio in a gated complex on a desolate block of the city’s downtown. It had its own little yard, a perfect individualized square of Astroturf littered with drying dog shit. The apartment was tiny and brightly lit. I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t have it in me: On a low and flimsy bookcase by the window sat the only extraneous objects in the apartment. There was a small pot of molded rubber succulents, a digital clock, and a chubby little statuette of an owl.

All night I kept waking up thinking the sun was rising because light was streaming in through the blinds. It was only the streetlamps. When I was sure that it was day, I got out of bed and went for a run. In the daylight everything seemed washed out, like an old, sepia-toned photograph. The streets were nearly empty, the sidewalks too. The few people I encountered all looked homeless or lost. I ran past the old motels and casinos on Fremont Street and paused to watch a crane demolishing an old hotel as other machines somewhere out of sight sprayed jets of water that spurted up into the wreckage seven and eight stories high. There were still curtains in the windows. I ran past city hall and a courthouse and the headquarters for the city police. I had to stop at almost every corner to wait for the light to turn. At one of them a man spoke to me. He was maybe twenty-five and had long hair, a hoop hanging from his septum, and a stunned look in his eyes. His voice was flat. He wasn’t looking at me but there was no one else around.

“It’s all fun and games till you hit a red light,” he said.

I nodded in vague agreement. The light turned green, but still he didn’t move.

In his autobiography, the Romanian scholar of religions Mircea Eliade recalled creeping out of his room as a small boy on a drowsy summer afternoon while the rest of his family was napping. He crawled into the drawing room, which was usually locked and which he was forbidden to enter. “The next moment I was transfixed with emotion,” Eliade wrote. “The room was pervaded by an eerie iridescent light. It was as though I were suddenly enclosed within a huge grape.” Later in life he was able to return at will to “that green fairyland,” he wrote, “and I would rediscover that beatitude all over again; I would relive with the same intensity the moment when I had stumbled into that paradise of incomparable light . . . I would slip into it as into a fragment of time devoid of duration—without beginning and without end.” He found it waiting for him even during a prolonged depression in his late adolescence, but by then the experience had become a source of sadness rather than comfort: “By this time I knew the world to which the drawing room belonged—with the green velvet curtain, the carpet on which I had crept on hands and knees, and the matchless light—was a world forever lost.”

This “epiphanic vision,” as he called it, and his nostalgia at its loss, would sit at the core of Eliade’s thinking. There was the sacred—reality stripped bare, the pure, dazzling ontological foundation of the world—and there was the profane, the workaday realm of the relative, the rational and geometric, time that could be chopped and segmented. An abyss lay between them. “Primitive” man and spiritual adepts of past eras had perfected various means of crossing it, Eliade believed, but by the twentieth century humanity had tumbled into a thoroughly “desacralized world.” Secular modernity had left us with a cosmos that was “completely profane.”

The sharpness with which he held on to these distinctions—sacred and profane, pure and impure—defined his politics as well. As a young man in the 1930s Eliade had allied himself with the ultranationalist and violently anti-Semitic Iron Guard, Romania’s creepily spiritualized analog to Germany’s Nazis and Mussolini’s Black Shirts. The local fascist movement was “so profoundly mystical,” Eliade had gushed, “that its success would designate the victory of the Christian spirit in Europe.” In a journal he kept during the war, Eliade recorded his growing depression as the Allies triumphed and Hitler suffered loss after loss.

Not long after Hitler’s final defeat, Eliade began working on the book that would make his reputation in the English-speaking world. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, first published in French in 1949, would allow him to reinvent himself as an apolitical scholar concerned with universal themes. In it, Eliade argued that until the arrival of the Hebrew prophets, time was universally understood as cyclical, and was bound through ritual to the sacred. Regularly recurring religious ceremonies enacted, and reenacted, the creation of the cosmos, allowing their participants to play a direct role in the “regeneration of the world,” “projecting” themselves into “mythical time.” Only after the prophets, for Eliade, did history enter the picture. In their writings, the defeats and humiliations of the Jews “clearly appeared as punishments inflicted by the Lord in return for the impiousness of Israel.” God became an actor in history whose interventions could be tracked over time. Historical events took on spiritual significance. “It may . . . be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God.”

Mythical time was then replaced by messianic time, which was necessarily linear: it led somewhere. The regeneration of the cosmos no longer recurred in cycles according to a sacred calendar, but was deferred into the future. It would come when God willed it. Time had a beginning and an end, and through them, a meaning. By the twentieth century, deprived of God and the possibility of future redemption but stuck nonetheless on this now single-tracked time, humanity faced a new challenge: how to “tolerate” history, as Eliade put it, and its horrors. “We should wish to know,” he wrote, “how it would be possible to tolerate, and to justify, the sufferings and annihilation of so many peoples who suffer and are annihilated for the simple reason that their geographical situation sets them in the pathway of history; that they are neighbors of empires in a state of permanent expansion.” He was not talking about the Jews, but about Romania, which had been occupied by the Soviet Union in 1944 and had, in the peace that followed, lost much of its territory to that still-powerful neighbor.

Eliade would spend much of the rest of his life downplaying, evading, and denying the intellectual attachments of his youth, but it has not been lost on his critics that, even after his reinvention of himself as a sober universalist, he lay it at the feet of the Jewish prophets that mankind had been thrown into “the terror of history.” It is indeed terrifying, and likely was for Eliade. His own past had become a nightmare, at once because he suddenly found himself obligated to hide it, to disown his deep politico-spiritual convictions, and because it was gone. The green-curtained drawing room with its soft, Edenic light was gone. His homeland, lost to communism and to which he would never return, was gone. The spiritualized future of which he had dreamed, in which Romania, and Europe, would find redemption by reclaiming its ancient values, that too was gone.

Eliade’s losses were almost infinitely less significant than those of many who survived the war, but it is perhaps because he endured them that he was able to form the kernel of an insight that is worth preserving, and developing: that there is a causal link between the experience of catastrophe and a messianic, and hence linear, experience of time. Messianism is knotted tight to collective trauma, its frequent product and near constant adornment. What help are cyclical recurrences when the past offers nothing but pain? The circle must be broken, if only to escape, to run in as straight a line as possible toward some other future, the dream of a world made new.

Eliade wasted little ink on the sufferings of the Jews either in the recent or the ancient past, but should we be surprised that a people who were slaughtered and scattered again and again should have been so well able to articulate the desperate hope that all of this suffering might lead somewhere, that it might end with the restoration of what has been lost? In the sixth century B.C., Jeremiah described Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem, the burning of the city, the destruction of its walls, and the slaughter of its nobles. On the ashes of the temple, the prophet erected a vision of redemption: The exile will end, the past will end, the future will bring vengeance. Babylon too will be conquered. The destroyer will be destroyed, all its warriors slain, its treasures plundered, its waters gone dry. Nothing will be left of it but waste and ruins, “and the owls shall dwell therein.”

It was probably five when I woke but I managed to stay in bed until the sun was almost up. I pulled on a pair of shorts and a hoodie and jogged north, skirting downtown and the old casino district, J. Cole singing through my earbuds about keeping his faith strong. Yeah, yeah. I headed for what had looked on Google Maps like a park. It turned out to be a cemetery, the grass brown, graves bright with plastic flowers. For blocks the sidewalk outside the fence was lined with the tents of the homeless. A place for the living, a place for the dead. In the distance to the west I could see the mountains, clouds gathering behind them like higher mountains still.

Eventually I circled back and headed home, the sun on my left. From the parking lot of an evangelical church that appeared to have once been a bank, drive-through teller window still intact, I could see the city laid out beneath me to the north and the east. It went on, flat and mainly treeless, for miles until, just shy of the mountains, it stopped and suddenly became desert again.

I keep telling myself that it’s the same desert, only paved. As soon as you get outside the city, the same plants are growing, the same animals racing along trails their ancestors scratched into the surface of the earth, the quickest transit from bush to rock to bush. When I stand outside the apartment at night—I stand out there a lot on that stupid square of Astroturf—the sky is so hazy and fouled with artificial light that I can make out only the brightest stars. Every lot and vacant acre and the bare strips along the sidewalks, all of it has been methodically denuded. As if naked dirt were preferable to the undisciplined sprawl of life. The medians that divide the freeways are covered in gravel to prevent anything alive from sprouting forth. In some spots the city or the county or the highway authority has erected metal sculptures of desert plants—rebar ocotillos and Joshua trees—to replace whatever was once growing there.

I pinned a sprig of creosote above the door to remind myself. Most of the time it doesn’t work. Only at dawn and at sunset, when the sky puts on the same familiar show—sometimes gaudy, sometimes restrained—can I convince myself with any certainty that this is desert here.

What if time as we understand it—this infinitely segmentable line stretching from unseeable past to unforeseeable future—is not an arrow but a scar? What if, as Eliade suggests, we owe our conception of linear time to the sufferings of a then-obscure monotheistic tribe, torn from its homeland in the sixth century B.C.? Could time, as it clicks away, still carry those traumas with it? And us with them? Could all the divisions to which we subject it—those measurable as minutes and seconds, and the vaguer and more intimate fragments that we call moments—echo an original mutilation that was not metaphorical at all? Could time itself be haunted? Does some basic violence reach into the marching of the hours?

If it does, we don’t need to blame Nebuchadnezzar and Jeremiah. We don’t need a single point of origin. This haunting finds room for everyone. Catastrophe, at least, is eternal. But for the sake of conjecture, we can tell a story here, a story about time. I have suggested that all narratives are lies, paths clumsily hacked through the knotted snarl of truth. This does not mean that we don’t need them, and the fact that we need them does not mean that we should not strive to do without them, to look always for other paths, or no path at all, but a bed, if we can bear it, at the heart of the tangle, thorns and pokey bits and all. But I’m not there yet. I need a way to think through time. So let’s begin where Eliade left off, with the Babylonian exile—or population transfer, as today’s politicians would call it—and with those nags, the prophets. After a long siege, Jerusalem is burned, its people scattered. This part can be verified. Archaeologists have found evidence of a thorough conflagration reaching into almost every corner of the city. This was in 586 B.C. Thousands had already been deported to Babylon after another siege eleven years earlier. Many survived. Some stayed. Others eventually returned, but their sense of time was almost certainly altered.

Trauma stops time. That’s what it does. Catastrophe breaks all cycles. Whatever rhythm had once been attained collapses. This is as true of car wrecks and heartbreak as it is of genocidal wars. If you manage to survive, time starts over. It has to. But it resets. A gulf separates you from what came before. That past belongs to someone else. Time begins now with the disaster. You begin with the disaster. What came before is irrecoverable—catastrophe has cut it off—so time starts afresh at that traumatic moment and proceeds . . . into what? We don’t know. If we knew once, or thought we did, we don’t anymore. The future we thought was promised us belongs also to the past. Time proceeds into the unknown. An arrow shot into the void. Or a scar, inching like a worm through the night.

By the beginning of what we now call the first century of the common era, the Jews, with their hope for the Messiah and their by now inherited, traumatized, and hence linear understanding of time, were one of many peoples spread about the shores of the Mediterranean living under Roman rule. This, a military occupation of their ancestral lands, was in itself a trauma, one that echoed others already centuries old. Like all subject peoples, they resented the encroachments of Empire. But Empire is ruthless. It survives by destroying all resistance. When organized rebellion broke out in the province of Judea in the year 66 of the current era, the Romans crushed it with methodical cruelty. By the year 70, Jerusalem had again been razed, its walls smashed, its rebuilt temple destroyed once more. The historian Flavius Josephus, who fought for the Jews and later became a faithful servant of the Roman Empire, estimated that more than a million died in the siege of Jerusalem and that another ninety-seven thousand were enslaved. Even if he was exaggerating by a factor of ten, or even one hundred, the trauma must have been profound.

Catastrophe is eternal. It always comes back. Some fifty years later it happened again. Another revolt, with still more devastating consequences. Hundreds of thousands more were killed, and many others died of hunger and disease. Alongside these fresh disasters, a new religious movement began to spread among the Jews and from them to other colonized and traumatized peoples throughout the Roman Mediterranean: the Messiah had already come, it insisted, but he’d been rejected, executed like a common criminal. With his arrival, time had started over. With his return, time would end. For good this time.

This new religion, Christianity, sought to set itself apart from other sects. It was not bound to a people or a place. It did not require the memorization of arcane rules of behavior, complex ritual proscriptions and codes of purity. Its most energetic publicist, Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul, ecstatically declared that Christ had freed his followers from the tyranny of the Law: his followers would be justified through faith. And faith, in this context, was primarily a relationship to time, an orientation to the future. Faith was purest expectation. Time, this thing set in motion with creation and reset with Christ’s birth and crucifixion, would end with his return. The universe would be redeemed. The faithful would be rewarded with the greatest of all conceivable gifts: eternal life, timelessness in the presence of God. Paradise was reimagined as an escape from the trauma of time.

This new sect was so extraordinarily successful that within a few short centuries—which would henceforth be counted from the birth of the Messiah—it had been adopted by the Empire itself. A creed of unalloyed expectation, with a few colorful and blood-drenched strings attached, it would prove a uniquely flexible faith, a source of solace to the dispossessed capable also of offering succor to their conquerors. And—this is perhaps its greatest strength—to whatever fresh populations they chose to conquer and dispossess. As the centuries gathered it would be spread by sword and cannonade to the Americas, to Africa and Asia and farthest Australia. The people of those continents—their own calendars destroyed, their songs and feast days banned, their sacred texts burned, their elders and their infants slaughtered, and their ancestors defiled—would in turn be thrust reeling into traumatized time. The cycles were broken, the rhythms destroyed. For them too, time became a wound. But the conquerors were merciful: they brought a salve, a promise that one day this vale of suffering could be escaped. And until that day the conquered could find in Christ what so many others had found before them, the sweet and tearful solace of purest expectation.

This is just a story that I’m telling, but it works, I think. To understand time as I was brought up to understand it, as most of us are, is to contemplate emptiness and loss. In what medium does the present float before it becomes the past? Not in fullness but a void. And what is time but constant sundering, loss after loss, a story trauma tells itself about itself? How could it be anything but painful to conceive of our lives as segments, amputated on both ends, adrift in a sea of nothing? And how else might we begin to understand the strange and creosotal growth by which songs about a distant and hazily remembered river, the Jordan, composed more than two thousand years ago by Jews exiled to the banks of another river, the Euphrates, would be sung in a new language on the banks of yet another river, the Mississippi, by the children and grandchildren of Africans torn from their homes and transported to a strange and hostile continent, beseeching the god who appeared to have abandoned them for vengeance and for mercy, to help them back across that river, and into the promised land?

My other grandparents—not the one obsessed with the stars, and his wife, or by that time ex-wife, who preceded him to the grave—were Jews. Which is to say they wore their scars plainly, with hope and a sad sort of pride. They were also communists. Which is to say that they believed in the perfectibility of humankind, in other words in progress, in unalloyed expectation, and that they didn’t fuss too much over old scars. One day revolution would wash the tired past away, along with all the injustices and exploitation that framed the world in which they lived. In which we still live. “Reality,” as the novelist Roberto Bolaño wrote, “can be pure desire.”

I was six when my grandmother died, but I knew my grandfather well, or as well as a very young man can know a very old one. He died at ninety-four, when I was twenty-six. When I visited him, mainly we talked nonsense and made each other laugh. He read two papers over coffee every morning, The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. I remember him folding the sections neatly, patting them down with a sigh as if he were saying good night to a difficult child, and then turning to me, his bright eyes sparkling slyly before either of us said a word.

His father had sold matches on the streets of New York City when he arrived here from Hungary, but my grandfather was born in Philadelphia. He went to university and graduated with a degree in chemistry. That field, he discovered, was closed to Jews, so he found work in a public high school, teaching the subject that he had not been allowed to practice. He met my grandmother there—she was teaching French—and fell at once in love with her and under the sway of her formidable father, who wrote dispatches for the left-wing Yiddish newspapers—first for Dos Abend Blatt and later for the Morgen Freiheit—that were passed around the tenements and garment factories of lower New York and Philadelphia. They would sit for hours, father and son-in-law, talking and drinking glass after glass of tea. This was the 1930s. Then too, an entire world seemed about to collapse. For many, it did collapse. My grandfather read Marx and came to believe in the possibility of another world, a better one than this.

Years later—years after my grandmother died, years after Joe McCarthy drank himself to death, years after communists were purged from the Philadelphia Teachers Union and my grandfather was locked out of yet another career—he would put pen to paper in an attempt to explain the passions that had guided him. He was in his nineties by then, at the end of his life, but he used the present tense: “I want to grasp the universe and everything in it,” he wrote. “I want to understand the nature of the physical world, the dynamics of society, the processes of history, the physiology of the cell and of the whole organism, the neurology and psychology of man, the cultural and individual diversities of all the peoples of the world.”

He did not, he clarified, want only to comprehend all this intellectually, “but feelingly. Such feelingful understanding is akin to love, and so I might say, and do emphatically say, that I want to love. It is this love, I think, not Marxist analysis of class struggle, which has brought me to socialism and beyond.”

Often I wonder what he would make of this world, of what has happened since he left it, of the Rhino and the rising oceans and fascism and anti-Semitism okay again as if the twentieth century never happened. Usually I’m glad that he doesn’t have to see it. Except that I can still see him, never mind the twenty years that have passed since his funeral. He’s right here, time and death be damned. I can smell the soapy smell of him, can feel the crepe-soft skin on the back of his hands, his brittle bones beneath my arm. I can see him leaning forward in his chair to lay the newspapers aside and, as he looks up, before either of us says a word, I can hear the sorrow and the mischief in his laugh.

There is a compressed, ambient violence to Las Vegas that I have never felt in any other city I’ve spent time in, even places that were actually at war. The boulevards so wide and straight and empty. The supermarkets huge and empty, the twenty-four-hour laundromats empty, the abandoned houses empty, the empty lots empty. Always, and especially at night and early in the morning, a sense that something terrible is about to happen, that it will have to happen, if only to fill all the emptiness. Or that something terrible has already happened without announcing itself, and is happening right now.

I stopped at a thrift store on my way home this evening. I needed a table small enough to fit in the kitchen, something I wouldn’t mind leaving behind. But I found nothing, just bright lights and long rows of doleful garments, the stale smell of unloved things. On my way out I noticed that the two guards at the door—one in uniform, the other not—looked suddenly alert. Something was up. They stopped the woman walking out beside me. I kept walking.

I had already started my car when I heard her screaming. I turned off the car and got out. A third guard, in a red and black uniform, had shoved the woman to the ground. He had his knee in her back and was holding a canister of pepper spray to her face. He was telling her to cooperate. “I am cooperating,” she was saying. There was panic in her voice. I took out my phone as I walked back across the parking lot. I held it out in front of me and told the guard that I would put him all over the internet if he sprayed her. He was confused, and angry, and we argued for a minute but eventually he holstered the mace, still holding her down with one arm and a knee. He tugged her elbow behind her back and the plainclothes guard helped him drag her to her feet.

“No!” she was shouting, again and again. Then she began to beg. “Please, let me go. Please.”

A pair of slacks fell from beneath her skirt onto the concrete. They lay puddled there, beige and limp, almost liquid in their sadness. The other guard pointed them out to me, as if to justify his colleagues’ response.

I told him I didn’t care what she had done, they shouldn’t brutalize her. The guard with the mace took umbrage. He was already leading her off into the parking lot toward his patrol car. She was still begging.

“Brutalize her?” he said, disgusted. “She your wife?”

Walter Benjamin had a very different concept of messianic time than the one I am articulating here, but my goals are not different from his. What I have been calling messianic time—that empty, over-bright hallway with a single door at the end—is closer to his notion of “universal history,” a sort of bland and featureless substrate in which events line up, dumbly, “like the beads of a rosary.” To this, Benjamin opposed what he called “Messianic time,” which he defined as “time filled with the presence of the now.” And “now,” in his understanding, is not a mere step in that procession, some fragment of a moment that can be marked and measured as it stumbles past. The “time of the now” is pregnant with all that has come before it. The present holds the entirety of the past within it “in an enormous abridgment.” And the past, for Benjamin, is hardly dead. It calls out, demanding redress. It exists in the present as demand. It pulses, turning always toward its own redemption.

The arrival of the Messiah—or of the revolution, for Benjamin was a strange sort of Marxist—is a future event to be hoped for and fought for, but not only for the material reversals it will bring about. Perhaps foremost, it is a recovery of the past. It is time healed. Like light through a wire screen, the possibility of redemption surges through the present. The trick is to see it, to hear it, to be able to reveal it, an explosive nucleus of insurrectionary possibility contained in every moment. As Benjamin put it, every second “is the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter.”

The struggle in which Benjamin understood himself to be engaged was hence for the past as well as the future, for all those who had been displaced and erased as well as those presently under threat of erasure. It was a battle, defined in terms at once spiritual and political, over history, that it not be conceived via the self-flattering deceits of the victors as a “triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate,” in which they succeed at disguising their atrocities as the grand achievements of civilization on the march. “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins,” wrote Benjamin.

They are still not safe. And as long as they’re not, we’re not.

I drove back to Joshua Tree for the weekend. I needed some things for the apartment and was happy for the excuse to get out. And I wanted to check on one small thing. So I made that same drive in reverse: out of Vegas, past the Strip and the golden monolith of the Rhino’s hotel, past the outlying casinos and the prison and the spooky solar-thermal plant, up through the forest of Joshua trees, past the dunes in Kelso and the volcanic crater in Amboy and the salt flats there and over the mountains into Wonder Valley. I drove past the base, past my old street, and straight to K. and A.’s.

As soon as I got out of the car I had my answer: a week had passed since the rain had come and already the earth was covered with a thin, green fuzz. The grass was coming in. It was all starting over.

The Chemehuevi believed that humans are the offspring of Ocean Woman and Coyote. Not Coyote as in a coyote, like the one I watched through the kitchen window of my friend J.’s house in Joshua Tree. He was a big, healthy animal with bright eyes and a thick, clean coat. J. and his partner had constructed a few watering holes around the property, concrete hollows that they filled with water to attract the local critters. The coyote had come to drink but the wind was blowing hard, shrieking and whining, making the creosotes shiver and scattering the smells so that every few seconds the coyote would get spooked by something, trot off in a panic, look around, then slink back for another few sips before scooting off again. It was a fine performance of coyoteness, at once goofy and majestic.

The Chemehuevi were talking about someone else: Coyote with a capital C, one of the Immortals, a godlike predecessor of living coyotes, and of humankind, who bore that name way back in the mythic past, “When the Animals Were People.” Until whites began to settle the Mojave in the late nineteenth century, time for the Chemehuevi was split neatly in two. There were present times, in which the stars circled and the seasons of hunting, planting, and sowing rolled past every year, and there were those ancient days, the irrecoverable story times, right out of a dream, hallucinatory, comic and violent and lewd, when Coyote fooled Cicada into sleeping with his own sister, when Owl’s wife and son murdered him by trickery only to be killed by Skunk with a cloud of noxious fart, when Coyote ate his own brains and was convinced by his tail to roast himself, when Lizard sodomized Coyote and hid before Coyote could return the favor, when Coyote caught his aunt Bear masturbating with a pestle and she pulled him to her and clawed off his loins and Wolf killed and butchered a mountain sheep so that his brother could be re-loined and Coyote, thus restored, killed his aunt and butchered her and gathered all her insides but the spleen, which slithered from his grasp and spoke: “Tell!” the spleen told him.

“In the story time,” George Laird told Carobeth, “everything talked.”

That Coyote, the ancient one, our great-grandfather, was a shape-shifter and trickster par excellence, curious and impulsive, lusty and mischievous, a schemer and a fool, “capable of all good and all evil, buffoon and hero, benefactor and villain.” He was nothing like his brother. Wolf was handsome, dignified, compassionate, all-knowing. Wolf was “the ideal man.” His advice for his brother was always prudent. Coyote always ignored it or, if he on some whim decided to obey, bungled things into catastrophe again. Wolf was wise but humorless. Coyote was a disaster but he knew how to laugh. The Chemehuevi had a saying, at once melancholy and proud, that Laird repeats throughout her books. They could have followed Wolf, they said, but they didn’t. “We followed Coyote.” It’s not clear to me if that “we” refers to the Chemehuevi or to all of humankind, but whatever they meant, it goes for the rest of us too. We followed Coyote.

“That is, in effect,” wrote Laird, “the end of the matter.”

I couldn’t stop myself from looking at my phone before getting out of bed this morning. The board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, I read, moved the Doomsday Clock thirty seconds forward. It is now two minutes to midnight by their reckoning, the latter being nuclear war or some other humanity-imperiling catastrophe. The clock has not been so close to midnight since 1953, after the United States and the Soviet Union both tested their first hydrogen bombs. The board, which includes fifteen Nobel laureates, cited tensions between the United States and North Korea, the United States and Russia, the United States and China, and India and Pakistan; “an insufficient response to climate change”; and “the velocity of technological change,” meaning the dominance of easily manipulable digital media, hackable financial and power infrastructures, gene editing, and autonomous weaponry capable of killing without human authorization. The plots of every science fiction novel published since the 1960s are unfurling all at once.

When I got home last night I noticed that a queen-sized mattress had appeared in the empty lot that adjoins my apartment complex. It’s a nice mattress, pillow-topped and only mildly stained. I didn’t realize in the dark, but I figured out this morning that it was just outside the fence that separates the lot from my own little dog-shit-littered square of Astroturf, concealed by a hedge of bamboo. When I left to go out for a run there was someone sleeping on it, a blanket pulled over his head. Or her head.

I stuck to the side streets to avoid the long red lights and the dazed casino-goers smoking on the sidewalks. The only other people out were the homeless, pushing shopping carts or pulling battered suitcases behind them. A few were ranting, ecstatic or enraged, but most just looked exhausted. I ran north on Main Street, past empty, fenced-off expanses of crumbling asphalt. The buildings that weren’t abandoned looked abandoned. (Again, from R. C. Thompson’s Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia: “The occupation of ruins by spectres is a universal superstition.” Las Vegas is perhaps not so much a city as a mechanism for turning people into ghosts.) Clouds bunched behind the mountains to the west. The motels had such heavy security screens bolted over their windows that they looked boarded off and dead. I passed an enormous marijuana dispensary and a small sign on the sidewalk identifying the land behind it as the Las Vegas Paiute Colony, a ten-acre plot that until the 1980s was the only land reserved for the people who lived in this basin before whites arrived. There’s no sense in building a casino in Las Vegas, so the Paiute opened a twenty-four-hour smoke shop with a drive-through window and, after the legalization of marijuana in Nevada, the dispensary, which is also open all night. The lampposts around it were covered with posters advertising bargain cigarettes. One was for a brand called Timeless Time. It went for $40.89 a carton.

When I got home again a couple, a man and a woman, were lying on the mattress. I can see them now, through my kitchen window on the other side of the bamboo. They’re gathering and folding their possessions, getting ready for the day.

I almost forgot: earlier this month, on a Saturday, at 8:07 in the morning, a Hawaii state employee chose the wrong option from a drop-down menu and sent a text message to every cell phone in the state, warning residents that a ballistic missile was headed their way. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” the message read. All through the islands, people said goodbye. With no time for individual confessions, the Bishop of Honolulu, dressed in a T-shirt, offered a general absolution to everyone who made it to church.

I read an article on Twitter with a fresh angle on the scare: the porn aggregator site Pornhub had reported that their local traffic dropped by 77 percent between the moment the alert went out and 8:45 a.m., when the state got around to sending a second text declaring that the first one had been a false alarm. Most people, apparently, didn’t want to go out glued to the monitor, with sticky hands and their shorts around their knees. Which is comforting, I guess. By nine o’clock, when the panic had ended and something like relief had begun to sink in, traffic to the site in Hawaii spiked, leaping to 48 percent more visitors than Pornhub would see on a normal Saturday morning. Not dying in a nuclear holocaust is apparently arousing.

The Chemehuevi’s neighbors, the Mohave, did not look upon Coyote with such affection. In their pantheon, Coyote functioned as a sort of anti-Prometheus: Tasked with fetching fire to cremate the dead god Matavilya, he dawdled and came back empty-handed. By that time the pyre was already burning—Fly got it going with a stick and dried bark—and Badger and Raccoon and the others were standing around it, weeping and mourning. Coyote cried too, but he wasn’t really sad. He was faking. When he saw his chance, he leaped over Badger and Raccoon, stole the dead god’s heart before the fire could consume it, and ran off. As soon as the heart had cooled, he gobbled it down. Matavilya’s son Mastamho cursed Coyote, condemning him to ignorance, foolishness, and an eternity of wandering.

Unlike the Chemehuevi, the Mohave were a sedentary people. They were agriculturalists who farmed the banks of the Colorado River. It isn’t surprising that they saw less to admire in Coyote than the nomadic Chemehuevi did. Coyote’s skill at wrestling sustenance from the desert did not make him a role model for them, but a thief, and a competitor for protein. White ranchers would come to hate Coyote too, as much on principle as out of fear for their stock. Over the last century and a half, millions of coyotes have been methodically exterminated, poisoned, and hunted from helicopters and small planes, hung from fence posts as a warning. In Nevada you don’t need a license to shoot them. Anyone can hunt them all year round.

But Coyote is clever. When Europeans arrived on this continent, the animals’ range was limited to the Southwest and the Plains. Everywhere else, wolves kept them in check. We were even more methodical at wiping out wolves, though, and over the last century coyotes have spread north and east, into New England, south Florida, New York’s Central Park, filling the void left by their brethren. Somewhere along the line they bred with the few surviving wolves and got bigger, stronger. If we followed Coyote, Coyote also followed us, and prospered. He is better at this than we are. And once we’re gone—because one day we will go—he will almost certainly remain. With a yowl and a grin, and god’s heart smoking in his teeth.

If the ratio of people without homes to homes uninhabited by people is a useful index of hidden violence—for what else but the certainty of greater pain keeps people who are cold and exposed from taking warmth and shelter when it’s there to be had?—then Vegas is more brutal than most. Last night a police car spent a long time idling beside the lot on the other side of the fence from my apartment. It could have been coincidence, but someone also might have called them about the mattress to report whoever it was for sleeping with more comfort than they were legally entitled to. When I woke this morning there was a man on the mattress. I guess he outwaited the cops. He was alone this time and got up early. He was up already when I went out for a run a few minutes after dawn. I ran almost to the Strip. I made it as far as the Stratosphere, a slender eleven-hundred-foot concrete tower with a spaceship-like disc on top that I can see from my kitchen window. I stopped, stared up at it for a while, felt discouraged, and turned around. When I got back the man on the mattress was gone.

Eliade was wrong. The circle and the spiral were not the only shapes that time could take before collective trauma ironed out its curves. It is bigger than that, roomier. There are other ways to see this. Like their neighbors, the Chemehuevi, the Mohave understood time to have been split in two. For them as well, there was the time of the gods, when animals were people and the great figures of myth still walked the earth. And there was the era that followed, in which the Mohave and the Chemehuevi lived, sealed off from their creators by a divide that could be bridged solely through dreams. Until the whites came, that latter era rolled along with the cycles of the seasons. The more important shape, though, was a line: not the one-way arrow of time propelling us ceaselessly into the future, but a horizontal slash that cut a boundary between the gods and us.

This border was permeable in one direction only. The long-past acts of the gods determined everything that happened among humans, but nothing that occurred in this world could influence the gods. Their time was past, their stories over. Dreams, though, could take you to them. “I can go at any time to ask Mastamho whatever I want to know,” the shaman Nyavarup told the famed ethnologist A. L. Kroeber. “I could go tonight. It does not take me long to reach him.” Dreams were wormholes, paths between dimensions. They made the lost time of the gods almost contemporaneous with us. “The whole basis of knowledge of myth is due to a projection from the present into the era of the first beginnings—is the result of the utter obliteration of time,” Kroeber wrote.

Of course, time was not obliterated. It just had a different shape, and different rules. It was neither linear nor strictly sequential. The epic past continues, separated from the present only by our eyelids, by the categories our conscious minds thrust upon the world, and by our skill at dreaming.

A Mohave who fought well in battle, who outwitted his or her enemies, or performed any task with agility and grace was said to have “dreamed well.” A Mohave who stumbled or failed had “dreamed badly.” Whatever knowledge and virtues living men and women might carry were on loan from the other side of time and could be borrowed only through dreaming. The patterns that govern life on this side were first established on the other. Many of those patterns, the collective customs and beliefs of the Mohave, are laid out in the story of Mastamho, which was told to Kroeber and other anthropologists by various Mohave shamans—or “doctors,” as they called themselves—who insisted they had not heard the story or inherited it from others but had witnessed the narrated events themselves. They had been there, in dreams.

Mastamho’s tale begins with the death of his father, Matavilya. The version I will recount was told by another of Kroeber’s informants, a man named Jo Nelson, “aged about sixty” when Kroeber interviewed him in 1903, with the help of the translator Jack Jones. Nelson’s “mind was orderly, his procedure methodical,” Kroeber recorded. “He distinguished between hearsay and actual observation.” He cautioned, for instance, that he was not present when Matavilya fell sick, “but dreamed of him and saw him only when he died.” He picked up the story from there: Mastamho, still a young boy, and mourning his father, took the opportunity to teach the Mohave how to deal with death.

“When people die I want you to burn them,” he said.

He dispatched Badger to dig a hole, Raccoon to bring wood, Coyote to seek out fire. Of course, Coyote flubbed it and got himself cursed. Mastamho went on to finish the work of creation, building a world for the Mohave and showing them how to live in it. He directed the water into springs and a river—the Colorado. He lifted the earth into mountains and assigned territories to the Mohave, the Chemehuevi, and to neighboring tribes. He told them each which foods to eat, what languages to speak. Again and again he warned his listeners, “I will not die like Matavilya, but will become a bird.” First, he would tell them everything.

He showed the Mohave how to make sunshades and houses, how to plant seeds on the fertile banks when the river recedes, how to go to war and take slaves, how to make pottery, water jugs, and stewpots. “Do not forget what I tell you,” he warned. He delegated Mockingbird and Thrasher to teach the Mohave how to be happy when he was gone, how to feel good, how to marry and love and make children.

Finally Mastamho flapped his arms four times. They turned into wings. He became a bird, not an owl but an eagle. He flew low above the river to the south, where it spills into the Sea of Cortez. There he stayed. He forgot everything he had known, even how to catch fish and how to keep his plumage clean. “He was crazy and full of lice and nits,” Nelson told Kroeber. “He is alone, not with other birds, and sits looking down at the water: he is crazy.”

Last night I almost crashed the car again. I had to go to an event sponsored by the Institute that brought me here. It was in Henderson, in the southeast corner of the basin. I got on the freeway, the 515 this time. As the entrance ramp curved, it ascended high over the streets and I could see the entire city laid out in front of me, shimmering like a net of gold tossed across the valley floor. At the very center of it were the towers of the hotels and casinos along the Strip, gleaming blue and red and green as well as gold, a strange gem at the center of this still stranger setting. It was almost beautiful. I realized just in time that I was about to hit a concrete wall.

Later, in bed, staring at the glow of the city through the blinds, I couldn’t stop thinking about those lights. Why is everyone so afraid of the dark?

A. L. Kroeber was straightforward about the purpose of his work and its intended audience. In the preface to his monumental Handbook of the Indians of California, he cautioned that he was not writing “a history in the usual sense,” as the “vast bulk of even the significant happenings in the lives of uncivilized tribes are irrecoverable . . . Nor do the careers of savages afford many incidents of sufficient intrinsic importance to make their chronicling worthwhile.” Elsewhere, in one of several books on the Mohave, Kroeber wrote, “I have long pondered to whom we owe the saving of human religious and aesthetic achievements such as are recorded here. It is probably not to the group that produced them. Why should we preserve Mohave values when they themselves cannot preserve them, and their descendants will likely be indifferent? It is the future of our own world culture that preservation of these values can enrich, and our ultimate understandings grow wider as well as deeper thereby.”

Perhaps it was his own natural sensitivity, or his experience growing up as a Jew in Romania, and later in France, but the ethnologist and psychoanalyst George Devereux was less singularly enthralled with the virtues of “our own world culture” than Kroeber was. Devereux would recall the periods he spent living among the Mohave in the 1930s with such affection and nostalgia that, half a century later, before his death in 1985, he requested that his ashes be transported from Paris to the Mohave reservation in Parker, Arizona, and disposed of there according to Mohave ritual. Nowhere else in the world had Devereux felt so much at ease, and so at home. In the intervening decades he had published dozens of articles on the Mohave and one extraordinary book about them, Mohave Ethnopsychiatry and Suicide, which described the Mohave’s traditional understandings of mental disturbances in what at the time was an almost revolutionary fashion: on their own terms, as a system that was as accurate in diagnosis and effective in treatment as any devised in the West. The Mohave’s attentiveness to dreams and their general sexual openness, he argued, made them uniquely insightful about extrarational states, and empathetic to those who suffered from even the most floridly antisocial psychiatric symptoms. Madness, for the Mohave, carried no more stigma than any other ailment. Devereux’s descriptions of the isolation and confinement of the mentally ill in European asylums evoked in them only horror and disgust. They even treated him once, and cured him, of a severe bout of lovesickness.

Regarding Mastamho’s final transformation, and derangement, Devereux alluded to the Mohave belief that insanity at times resulted when a person’s “knowledge exceeded their heart.” When they knew too much, that is, more than they could handle and stay sane. Gods, one would expect, might be particularly susceptible to such disturbance, but Devereux was not willing to develop this idea. “The problem of psychologically disturbed deities,” he cautioned, “is an extremely complex subject, which transcends the limitations of the present work.”

Paris is flooding. Another new study published last week linked global temperature rise to an increased risk of flooding in central and western Europe. A couple of weeks ago NASA climate scientists ranked 2017 as the second-warmest year on record. The warmest was 2016, the third-warmest 2015. In fact, seventeen of the eighteen warmest years ever recorded have occurred since 2001, i.e., over the last seventeen years. This winter has been Paris’s wettest in a half century. The Seine is flowing four meters higher than usual. The Louvre had to close its lower level and hurriedly move thousands of precious artworks from subterranean storerooms. Rats, flushed from the sewers, are racing through the city’s plazas and streets. The British tabloids, which have for years been comparing immigrants to vermin, brought the metaphor full circle, announcing an “invasion” of “savage,” “disease-carrying” “refugee rats.” Cape Town, meanwhile, is poised to run out of water entirely.

Speaking of creosote: the famed anthropologist A. L. Kroeber was the father of the writer Ursula K. Le Guin, whose novels projected encounters between cultures alien to one another onto distant and imaginary planets. Hence that K. (“I don’t know what human nature is,” Le Guin had a character very much like her father wonder in one of her novels. “Maybe leaving descriptions of what we wipe out is part of human nature.”) It was also Kroeber who in 1903 inspired the nineteen-year-old John Peabody Harrington, then enrolled in a summer class at Berkeley, to study Native American languages. Just as Harrington, unwitting, would lead the nineteen-year-old Carobeth Tucker, enrolled in a summer class in San Diego, to a larger life than she had dared to hope for, a larger life than his.

The mattress is gone. No one had been sleeping on it for a few days and I hadn’t given it much thought. I guess someone hauled it off. When I went out this morning a man was sleeping in the alley outside the gate, curled up on a square of cardboard that was significantly smaller than he was. I jogged over to Las Vegas Boulevard and headed north, past the cemetery. Everyone there was just waking up, standing bent outside their tents and squeezing their belongings into shopping carts and suitcases, scrounging for the day’s first cigarette. Frank Ocean singing through my headphones about jumping off a roof into a pool. “Kiss the earth that birthed you,” he sang.

Las Vegas Boulevard passes through the Strip a few miles farther south. The other night I made a wrong turn and ended up getting sucked right into the heart of it. It was Saturday, and packed. Streams of tourists flowing through the crosswalks from the Venetian to the Mirage, palm trees and palazzos, fountains burbling, everybody jolly. It was early still. I stopped at a red light beneath the Stratosphere, relieved to have reached the end of the Strip, and looked up to see a body tumbling toward me from above. I only noticed the guide wires just before it disappeared behind a wall. I went home and looked it up: for twenty-five dollars you can jump off the thing.

It’s not as cold as it was, but there’s still snow on Mt. Charleston, which is where, I learned, the Chemehuevi believed that Coyote and Wolf resided. I had to run in and out of the street to avoid the bodies laid out sleeping on the sidewalk. Before I went running I had peeked at the news. The North Koreans told the South Koreans that they were willing to consider giving up their nuclear weapons and would freeze their testing program if the United States entered talks. So there’s that. The man was still sleeping in the alley when I got home. He was bearded, maybe ten years older than me. I went inside, grabbed a banana and the leftover chicken I had been planning to eat for lunch, and laid them in a foam takeout carton next to his head. He twitched a bit at the sound of my footsteps, but didn’t wake.

The Mohave, by the by, held the conventional and apparently almost universal beliefs about owls, that their presence outside a house was a sure sign that someone within would die.* But they had some other, more complicated notions. For the Mohave, according to Devereux, the ability to cure an illness involved accessing the same power that had caused it to begin with. Shamans could use their talents for good or evil, and benevolent healers had a way of transitioning into malevolent witches. Illnesses and deaths were hence frequently blamed on them. It was easy enough to tell if such suspicions were correct: the heart of a victim of witchcraft, the Mohave believed, would transform into a ball of flame and spontaneously emerge, several days after cremation, from the ashes that remained in the fire pit. It would then shape-shift into what Devereux described as a sort of featherless owl with a human face and ears. Unless the shaman responsible for bewitching the deceased swiftly drowned the awful creature in the river, an owl would swoop down and carry it off to its nest. When night fell, the owl would pop the creature on its back and fly off again, teaching it to cry out the name of whoever it was that bewitched it. Eventually it would turn into an owl itself and would fly through the night on its own, calling out to its killer by name, addressing him or her as “father,” so that the witch would be revealed and the victim’s loved ones could take revenge and kill the witch in turn.

“Anyhow,” said Devereux’s interpreter, whom he identified only as E.S., “the owls are Mohave, since they are the hearts of the Mohave.”

There was an eclipse last night. This morning, really, about an hour before dawn. It was a blue moon, full for the second time this month. It’s hard to believe so little time has passed since L. and I woke up in the desert on New Year’s Day. The moon was full then too. It’s still January and it’s been a long year already.

The Rhino gave his first State of the Union address last night. I couldn’t bring myself to watch, but a few hours earlier, at a lunch with various TV news anchors, he bemoaned the “tremendous divisiveness” that afflicts the United States and expressed his desire to unify the country. He cautioned, though, that “without a major event where people pull together, that’s hard to do.” The assembled journalists did not ask him to elaborate, and the Rhino did not specify what sort of event he meant, except to say that he would prefer to do it “without that major event because usually that major event is not a good thing.”

Maybe someone told him about the Reichstag fire.

My alarm was set for five fifteen but I woke up before it rang. I pulled on a sweatshirt and stepped out into the yard. The moon was hanging in the western sky, perhaps a quarter of it still bright and white, the rest a dirty, dusky red. Behind me, in the east, I could see Jupiter rising, fat and blurry in the haze. It was cold out so I got back in bed. But I wanted to see the rest of it and soon I was standing in the yard again, only a sliver of the moon still white. I went back to bed and still couldn’t sleep. I got up a third time. The white bit was gone, the moon erased, nothing left of it but a dingy smudge. I didn’t want to watch it come back—it could only be disappointing, an ordinary, silvery bright moon again—so I went inside and managed to sleep another hour.

Except for that one wrong turn, I haven’t yet been to the Strip. I’m sure I’ll go, but I’m in no hurry. I went once more than twenty years ago, passing through Las Vegas while driving across the country to move to L.A. It was August. I remember walking for hours from scorching sidewalk to air-conditioned casino to scorching sidewalk again, gawping at the glittering absurdity. Pirate battles staged every hour in a pool-sized sea on Las Vegas Boulevard, the soft carpets of the casino floors, the constant pingpinging of the slots.

I drive past it on the freeway every few days. Driving south from downtown, it begins with the Stratosphere. Then the gleaming, golden cenotaph of the Rhino’s hotel, then the Palazzo, the Venetian, the Wynn, and the Mirage, all of which are owned either by the troglodytic Sheldon Adelson or by another friend and confidant of the Rhino who just today stepped down from his post as finance chair of the Republican National Committee after more than one hundred of his employees told The Wall Street Journal that he had sexually harassed or assaulted them, sometimes with a German Shepherd in the room that responded only to his commands. In German. Then there’s Caesars and the Bellagio and the mini fake New York and the mini fake Paris and the Luxor, a giant black-glass pyramid that looks like the villain’s lair from a 1960s sci-fi comic. At night it emits the strongest beam of light in the world straight up from the apex of the pyramid, sending a clear message to any extraterrestrial observers that they need not bother with this planet. On a still night, if you slow down on the freeway you can see clouds of bats diving by the thousands through the beam, picking off the bugs in what amounts to the largest porch light in the solar system. Last is the Mandalay Bay, through the thirty-second-floor gold-leaf-encrusted windows of which Stephen Paddock fired eleven hundred rounds, killing fifty-eight people and injuring more than eight hundred others at the concert across the street. That was in October. It’s February, but except for the occasional #VegasStrong billboard, you’d never know this town had just witnessed a massacre. The writer who had this fellowship before me told me that when it happened she felt no surprise. “It sounds awful,” she said, “but it felt normal.”

For now, downtown is enough. It’s the city’s past—the graveyard of earlier casinos, their glamor gone sour—and a glimpse at its future. (Benjamin: “We begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”) If all of this is screaming one thing, it’s not glitz or wealth or even waste, it’s transiency. That nothing here can last. And not just here. Vegas is a microcosm of a globalized casino economy, a culture of pure and shiny spectacle, an empire built on buried murders and the adrenaline high of quick and brutal pleasures. Neon flickers on and flickers off again. Dust dulls the sequins and the gold. It’s getting hotter and the water’s almost gone. Downtown and the Strip are sinking because so much groundwater has been pumped out from beneath the boulevards. The water in Lake Mead is 130 feet lower than it was eighteen years ago. Climate scientists estimate that if carbon emissions are not aggressively reduced, the Southwest faces a 99 percent chance of a “megadrought”—one that would kill nearly all of the trees and all of the farms and toss up regular storms of toxic dust that would render the region uninhabitable—before the end of the century.

If there are no clocks in casinos it is not only because ignorance of the passage of time keeps the marks at the slot machines and the house deep in cash. It’s so that no one will recall that everything will disappear, that it’s disappearing already, that that’s what it does. (Benjamin again: “Gambling converts time into a narcotic.”) On that first early-morning run I took down Fremont Street last month, a demolition crew was tearing down an old hotel with jets of pressurized water, as if the water wasn’t already running out, as if the future would never arrive and the past were a mistake that could be simply rinsed away.

“The wise men tell us that the world is growing happier—that we live longer than did our fathers, have more of comfort and less of toil, fewer wars and discords, and higher hopes and aspirations. So say the wise men; but deep in our own hearts we know that they are wrong.” Thus did the ethnologist James Mooney begin his 1896 account of the Ghost Dance religion with a heresy of the highest order. The object of Mooney’s study was an outbreak of apocalyptic thirst that briefly, in the early 1890s, united the scattered native tribes of the American West in the belief that the end was coming: the whites would be washed away, the earth rejuvenated and redeemed. This conviction stood directly opposed to the faith common to members of Mooney’s own peculiar tribe, the pioneering predecessors of contemporary anthropology: that time was angled upward, that humanity had advanced through the various dusky stages of primitivism to the glories of European-style industrial modernity as if on a staircase, the muddied bottom steps inevitably giving way to gleaming marble, clear glass, and polished steel. (Or perhaps to a black-glass pyramid spitting light into the heavens.) If this conviction was not recognized among Mooney’s peers as a matter of faith, no more rational than the expectation that the messiah will appear at 6:00 p.m. next Tuesday, it was only because it was, and in many ways remains, so universally held that it was almost invisible as a potential object of critique.

Mooney himself was ambivalent, or perhaps simply stuck. On the one hand the smooth wall erected by the prevailing certainties of his race; on the other a terrifying landscape of rubble and destruction. He often slid comfortably into the conventional rhetorical modes, equating “civilization” and “the white man” as if there could be no gap between the terms. But he also at times found the courage to describe the entire edifice as a mirage, rejecting not only the fundamental credo that humanity was advancing to greater states of perfection, but the racial hierarchy on which the whole, murderous system depended.

Until his death twenty-five years later, Mooney worked for the U.S. government. As John Peabody Harrington would a generation later, he labored in the employ of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology, established in 1879 by the same act of Congress that created the U.S Geological Survey. The young nation, having acquired vast lands, desired an accounting of its possessions—be they mineral or human—so that they might be more fruitfully managed. The early Sumerian kingdoms left clay tablets enumerating the possessions of the state: sheep, slaves, grain, taxes owed and taxes paid. The American empire, in its infancy, produced annual reports. The ones published by the Bureau of Ethnology were fat and imposing documents bound in olive-green cloth, stuffed with essays long enough to be books of their own, and introduced by John Wesley Powell, the bureau’s architect and champion.

A former Union army officer who directed the bureau from its inception until his death in 1902—he also directed the U.S. Geological Survey for much of that period—Powell described its chief purpose as “the discovery of the relations among the native American tribes, to the end that amicable groups might be gathered on reservations.” Only via the fledgling discipline of ethnology, he proposed, could subject populations be controlled and the “Indian problem” solved: if the state did not understand the cultures, laws, and religious beliefs of the peoples it had conquered, it could hardly hope to convince them of the virtues of private property and church on Sundays. Out of this practical goal, early ethnologists almost incidentally, in Powell’s telling, came to define “an essentially distinct science, the Science of Man.” However far its practitioners may have wandered since, these are the roots of American anthropology.

James Mooney was never entirely down with the program. A child of Irish immigrants, Mooney understood something of the psychic costs of assimilation and the roundabout routes resistance might take. He grew up poor, in a household steeped in Irish folklore and in his mother’s recollections of the Great Famine of the 1840s, which wiped out a quarter of the Irish population. In the United States as in Britain, the Irish were still primarily perceived less as a people than as a “problem” to be solved. Newspapers and magazines routinely portrayed them in simian form, as “white negroes,” stuck on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. Mooney, who became obsessed with Native American cultures while still a child, surely saw the parallels. In 1890, at twenty-nine, he was en route to Oklahoma, then still Indian Territory, to continue his fieldwork with the Cherokee, about whom he had already published an essay in the bureau’s Seventh Annual Report. When rumors of a new religion reached Washington, Powell ordered Mooney to bypass the Cherokee and investigate the effects of the Ghost Dance on the tribes of Indian Territory.

The previous year, a Paiute ranch hand in the eastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains had a vision. His name was Wovoka, and he was said to be able to control the weather, to speak all languages and make animals talk, and to render himself invisible to whites. Word spread with astonishing swiftness: a messiah had arisen in the West. Tribes from as far as Oklahoma and the Dakotas had sent emissaries to Wovoka in western Nevada. They came on foot and on horseback and by trains tugged by steam locomotives over nearly fifteen hundred miles of plains, mountains, and deserts and back again, spreading the good news throughout the entirety of the American West. The same railroads that had abetted their dispossession, ending a world, would bring the far-flung seekers to the prophet. The message he gave them would help their people to survive in the new world they had inherited. The details of the creed and its rituals varied from tribe to tribe, but the essentials stayed the same.

A cataclysm was coming. Some thought it would be fire that would cleanse the land of whites. Some thought floods, others tornadoes. It didn’t matter: “The white race,” Mooney wrote, “being alien and secondary and hardly real, has no part in this scheme . . . and will be left behind with the other things of the world that have served their temporary purpose.” In their absence, the earth would be renewed. The sick would be healed and all the Indian dead returned, not only those who had recently fallen but the ancestors, and the animals with whom they had shared the land: “The new earth, with all the resurrected dead from the beginning, and with the buffalo, the elk, and other game upon it, will come from the west and slide over the surface of the present earth, as the right hand might slide over the left.”

To hurry it along, Wovoka taught his people and all who came to visit him a dance, which he instructed them to perform together at regular intervals. In some places thousands took part at once, dancing, singing, and “dying”—falling by the hundreds into tearful and ecstatic trances in which they communed with their most beloved dead. “Father, I come,” they sang, crying and moaning in grief and expectation. “Mother, I come. Brother, I come.” One of Mooney’s Arapaho sources showed him a letter dictated by Wovoka that summed up the tenets of the new faith: “Everybody is alive again.”

His study of the Ghost Dance would occupy Mooney for much of the next three years. He took part in the dance himself, recorded its songs, photographed its participants. He spent time with the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Caddo, Wichita, Omaha, Winnebago, Sioux, Shoshone, Navajo, Hopi, and Paiute, traveling, by his estimate, thirty-two thousand miles. In November 1891, he visited the messiah himself just northwest of the Walker River Reservation, near what is now the town of Yerington, Nevada, just under four hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas. He found the prophet hunting rabbits and left some days later weighed down with gifts: rabbit-skin robes, pine nuts, magpie feathers, and a cake of the sacred red paint that Ghost Dancers smeared on their faces to ease communication with the dead.

Wovoka, Mooney learned, had been born in 1856, around the time that white settlement of Northern Paiute lands began in earnest. “They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion,” Sarah Winnemucca, the Northern Paiute activist and educator, wrote of those early years. Within a decade of his birth, the old ways had ended. Disease, famine, and violence had reduced the Paiute to a tattered remnant. Wovoka grew up in the ruins of the world his parents had known. He found work with a rancher named David Wilson—local whites knew the prophet by the name Jack Wilson—and, during a solar eclipse in 1889, he told Mooney, he fell asleep in the middle of the day and was “taken up to the other world.” There he saw the creator and “all the people who had died long ago engaged in their oldtime sports and occupations, all happy and forever young.” God sent him back with orders to instruct his people to “be good and love one another, have no quarreling, and live in peace with the whites.” And to dance, and thereby hasten their deliverance.

Mooney understood that what he was witnessing was not an obscure outbreak of primitive superstitions but a tide of religious transformation crashing across a continent devastated by conquest. He didn’t put it quite this way, but the Ghost Dance was a way of resisting that obliteration, of enlisting the dead to stand alongside the living—and not just to stand, but to sing with them, to dance with them, to embrace them and help them to survive. Mooney knew that this had precedents. “And when the race dies crushed and groaning beneath an alien yoke,” he wrote, “how natural is the dream of a redeemer.” It was as natural in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas as it had been in Palestine nearly two thousand years before. Had not Jesus also promised resurrection into eternal life to a people suffering a cruel occupation? Had Christ’s message to his followers—to love one another, to turn the other cheek, and to render unto Caesar the things that were his—been all that different? “The doctrines of the Hindu avatars,” Mooney concluded, “the Hebrew Messiah, the Christian millennium and the . . . Indian Ghost Dance are essentially the same, and have their origins in a hope and longing common to all humanity.”

This was blasphemy. The entire self-understanding of European civilization had been meticulously constructed to avoid such a comparison. The religions of the world could be considered comparatively when arranged on a staircase, a ladder, or a pyramid, but not grossly unranked on a flat and open plain. Powell took the unusual step of disavowing his subordinate’s conclusions. In introductory remarks published alongside Mooney’s original report, Powell struggled to redraw the proper boundaries between “the superior race” and its delusional, primitive charges. He dismissed the Ghost Dance as a “curious evanescent cult, which seems rather a travesty on religion than an expression of the most exalted concepts within human grasp.” More broadly, Powell warned that “caution should be exercised in comparing or contrasting religious movements among civilized people with such fantasies” as the Ghost Dance. Mooney’s lyric excesses notwithstanding, no meaningful analogy was possible: “In mode of thought and in coordination between thought and action, red men and white men are separated by a chasm so broad and deep that few representatives of either race are ever able clearly to see its further side.”

Especially when it is filled with corpses. In the fall of 1889, the Sioux, like many other tribes, sent delegates to visit Wovoka. They returned to their reservations in South Dakota after the spring thaw, bearing a message that their people greeted with hunger. The Sioux had been, in Mooney’s words, “the richest and most prosperous, the proudest, and withal, perhaps, the wildest of all the tribes of the plains.” They had fought three fierce wars against the U.S. government in less than thirty years, seen the buffalo on which they relied exterminated and the territories promised to them by treaty shrink to three small, noncontiguous shards. “Then came a swift accumulation of miseries,” Mooney wrote: cattle disease, crop failure, one epidemic after another, famine assisted by acts of Congress.

Within a few months of the emissaries’ return from Nevada, the Ghost Dance had been embraced by the majority of the tribe. Deliverance would arrive, Wovoka had promised, the following spring. “There was another world coming, just like a cloud,” Wovoka had said, according to the Oglala Sioux holy man Black Elk. “It would come in a whirlwind out of the west and would crush everything on this world, which was old and dying. In that other world there was plenty of meat, just like old times; and in that world all the dead Indians were alive, and all the bison that had ever been killed were roaming around again.”

In August of 1890, worried that the new faith heralded a general insurrection, the agent charged with supervising the Pine Ridge reservation attempted to stop a Ghost Dance in which two thousand Sioux were participating. “A number of the warriors,” Mooney wrote, “leveled their guns toward him and the police, and told him they were ready to defend their religion with their lives.” The agent retreated. That November, the first federal troops arrived. In December, native policemen backed by one hundred U.S. cavalrymen attempted to arrest the Lakota warrior and visionary Sitting Bull at his home on the Standing Rock reservation. In the confrontation that followed, Sitting Bull was killed.*

Fearing a broader repression, a group of several hundred Sioux led by the Miniconjou Lakota chief Spotted Elk, also known as Big Foot, fled their homes on the Cheyenne River and hid out in the Badlands to the south. Starving and freezing, the refugees were returning to the Pine Ridge reservation on December 28 when they came across a detachment of troops from the Seventh Cavalry. Spotted Elk, sick with pneumonia, raised a white flag and agreed to an unconditional surrender. His people set up camp beside a creek called Wounded Knee. The next morning, December 29, Col. James Forsyth, commander of the Seventh Cavalry, ordered his soldiers to search the Sioux camp for guns. This endeavor, in Mooney’s diplomatic telling, “created a good deal of excitement among the women and children, as the soldiers found it necessary in the process to overturn the beds and other furniture of the tipis and in some instances drove out the inmates.”

One can imagine that the “excitement” was not the fun kind, though it would be hard to guess from Mooney’s report. In religious matters, he took pains to seek out native witnesses and informants, but in his account of the events at Wounded Knee, he relied almost entirely on military and government sources. Perhaps he understood that the issue was too politically dangerous to treat otherwise. Perhaps he knew that ethnological methods could only be applied to Indians. Whites got to speak for themselves. Perhaps, when it came to bullets flying, Mooney simply chose a side.

For all his efforts to portray the soldiers’ actions in a sympathetic light, his narrative is nonetheless damning, and all the more unsettling for its many vacillations. “It is said,” Mooney wrote, his use of the passive voice an index of his discomfort, that “one of the searchers now attempted to raise the blanket of a warrior.” Another young brave, it is said, “drew a rifle from under his blanket and fired at the soldiers,” who fired back with their own rifles and let loose “a storm” of 42 mm explosive artillery shells “at the rate of nearly fifty per minute, mowing down everything alive.” (The accounts of the few surviving Sioux were quite different, and involved a deaf man who did not understand the soldiers’ orders and a gun that went off by accident in the ensuing confrontation. So it is also said.) Twenty-five soldiers and most of the Sioux men were killed in the first barrage. The women and children who were able fled into a dry ravine. Some of them made it as far as two miles before the soldiers caught up with them.

They were found there when the troops returned on New Year’s Day, accompanied this time by civilians hired to bury the dead. It had snowed for three days straight, covering the bodies and the blood. Four infants were found alive beside their murdered mothers. One of them survived. The soldiers and the men in their employ dug a long, deep trench. “Into it were thrown all the bodies, piled upon one another like so much cordwood, until the pit was full, when the earth was heaped over them and the funeral was complete. Many of the bodies were stripped by the whites . . . and the frozen bodies were thrown into the trench stiff and naked. They were only dead Indians.”

Mooney estimated that three hundred Sioux were killed at Wounded Knee. Twenty of the soldiers who took part in the massacre would be awarded Medals of Honor. Their leader, Colonel Forsyth, would be exonerated of any guilt in the matter and promoted to the rank of major general. Mooney was as careful as he could be. The whole affair, he judged, was “simply a massacre.” He stressed that “the first shot was fired by an Indian,” which made the Sioux “responsible for the engagement.” Nonetheless, Mooney judged, “the wholesale slaughter of women and children was unnecessary and inexcusable.” His attempts to mitigate even this compromised judgment are painful now to read: “In justice to a brave regiment,” he wrote, “it must be said that a number of the men were new recruits, who had never before been under fire, were not yet imbued with military discipline, and were probably unable in the confusion to distinguish between men and women by their dress.”

Perhaps Powell pressured him to write it. Perhaps he gave in to some part of himself that in better moments he could not help but be ashamed of. Perhaps he was clever and calculating and, untroubled by conscience, knew precisely how far he could go. Perhaps he was so uncomfortably split that he did not see the contradictions and believed every word he wrote was equally true. In any case, the massacre effectively ended the Ghost Dance. God had not saved the Sioux. The disaster that came was not the one the prophet promised. “A people’s dream,” said the Oglala Sioux visionary Black Elk, had “died in bloody snow.” The whites were not wiped out, but thrived.

By 1896, when Mooney’s nearly five-hundred-page report was published in the second volume of the Bureau of Ethnology’s Fourteenth Annual Report, several tribes including the Sioux had stopped performing the Ghost Dance. Mooney concluded that they were disappointed by the failure of Wovoka’s prophecies. That is almost certainly true of the Sioux, but maybe it was also that the Ghost Dance had accomplished what it could. It had drawn the tribes together and allowed them to find not only devastation but strength in what they had lost. Having done that, they didn’t need it anymore. The Cheyenne and Arapaho and the other tribes exiled to the Oklahoma reservations were dancing still, Mooney reported, but without “the feverish expectation of a few years ago.” The Paiute were still dancing one year prior to the report’s publication, but Mooney didn’t know what had happened since. “As for the great messiah himself,” he wrote, “when last heard from Wovoka was on exhibition as an attraction at the midwinter fair in San Francisco.”

Bison skulls, 1870

It’s worth asking again. Is it possible to write without plundering? To leave something behind that is true? I don’t mean writing that is innocent. Such a script could have no meaning. I mean writing that takes sides, without compromise or dissemblance or theft, that stands not only with the living but with the dead, with everyone and everything that this society is working to erase.

George Laird danced the Ghost Dance too. It arrived among the Chemehuevi in 1890, which would have made him about eighteen. Both the Chemehuevi and the Mohave hold strong prohibitions against speaking of the recently dead, which may be why the Ghost Dance did not establish deeper roots among them. George apparently said little about it, except, Carobeth wrote, that he “was not seriously impressed by its teaching,” and joined the dancing only “for fun.”

But aren’t the enthusiasms of youth often an embarrassment to the old? Perhaps, after the failure of Wovoka’s prophecy, he preferred to downplay the earnestness of his involvement. Even lighthearted acceptance of an apocalyptic creed would likely have been inconceivable to the generations that preceded him. So long as time wheeled smoothly through the seasons, its interruption, destruction, and restoration would hardly have seemed desirable. The trauma of conquest broke all that. By George’s adolescence, “with the influx of white settlers and the assertion of governmental authority, the curtailment of hunting ranges, the frightful smallpox epidemics,” Carobeth wrote, “time had become suddenly, frighteningly linear.”

The Ghost Dance, she judged, “at once expressed and alleviated the sense of impending doom.” Perhaps it was something more than that, a way of transmuting death into survival, despair into togetherness and even hope. Viewed in retrospect, from a distance of forty years, that might have felt like fun.

I needed to get out of my head this afternoon, and out of the apartment, so I got in the car and drove south across the city toward Sloan Canyon, where I’d heard there were ancient petroglyphs carved into the rocks. The GPS directed me through a massive subdivision of faux-Italian, tile-roofed homes. Inspirada, it was called. I took Via Firenze to Via Contessa to Democracy Drive. None of it looked more than a few weeks old. The roads were freshly paved, the curbs and sidewalks not even poured, but there were box stores up already, built for neighborhoods that didn’t yet exist.

For miles around, to the very edge of the mountains, the desert was being devoured to make way for new construction. Bulldozers and earthmovers had torn up every shred of life, leaving only the dry dirt, ridged from the steel treads of the machines. I saw them parked in long lines like soldiers at rest: bright yellow graders, excavators, backhoes, scrapers arrayed behind a water tank painted red, white, and blue. PATRIOT CONTRACTORS, the side of it said. The machines were all idle, but sprinklers were nonetheless spraying water in high arcs over the ruined earth. To keep the dust down, I guess.

I got lost. The streetscape was evolving too quickly for the GPS to make sense of it. I drove down a long dirt road that led to a water tower surrounded by a wall topped with barbed wire. I got out of the car, walked a bit, tore off a sprig of creosote, and sniffed it. There was no one around to ask, only cameras and machines. I stopped at a fire station. It was as new as everything else. Someone had reckoned on the certainty of flames. The fireman who answered the door was friendly. I tried not to smile when he advised me to get back on Democracy and follow it all the way around the bend, past where it narrows, and to be sure to turn off before it ends.

Finally I found the trailhead. I had less than an hour of sun left, so I hurried up the wash. The plants were familiar from Joshua Tree: cat’s-claw and yucca, desert indigo and Mormon tea. The wash narrowed as it climbed. Walls of rough volcanic rock rose along both sides. Maybe two miles in, I spotted the first petroglyphs: two bighorn sheep in profile, carved into an outcropping high above the floor of the wash. A few feet farther they were everywhere I looked. More bighorns, lizards, branches, insects, stick-figure humans with long fingers raying out like stars. Some carried bows and arrows. Most, though, were abstract and indecipherable: wavy lines and circles or spirals, figure eights and shapes I could not make sense of. Some were many thousands of years old, chiseled into stone by people who lived here long before the Paiute.

I hiked back out, slowly, the sky going pink above the canyon walls. After the first mile I could see Las Vegas laid out in the valley beneath me. Again, that gleaming net of gold. It was nearly dark when I got to the car. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to drive back into the city, so I sat there as long as I could and watched the moon rise over the hills while the stars found their places in the sky.

Another school shooting. Seventeen dead in Parkland, Florida, all but three of them children. And another new study found that even if greenhouse gases are immediately reduced, sea levels will continue to rise for the next three hundred years.

It was eighty degrees in Washington, D.C., today. It’s February.

This is how they found Spotted Elk, also known as Big Foot, chief of the Miniconjou Lakota, on New Year’s Day of 1891. He was sick with pneumonia at the time of the massacre. I have found accounts saying he was shot while stepping out of his tent, others that claim he was killed before he could rise to his feet. His posture in the photo is hard to make sense of. Perhaps the snow had melted from beneath him. Perhaps it was there still, but rendered invisible by the lack of contrast in the image. Perhaps he was leaning forward even in death, attempting to see what lay before him.

______________

* From a poem by Natalie Diaz, who grew up on the reservation at Fort Mojave:

Angels don’t come to the reservation.

Bats maybe, or owls, boxy mottled things.

Coyotes, too. They all mean the same thing—

death. And death

eats angels . . .

* Mooney wrote of the old warrior—who after the Battle of Little Big Horn had been cast in a role similar to the one played by Osama bin Laden in the post-2001 United States—with as much qualified respect as he could permit himself: “He has been mercilessly denounced as a bad man and a liar; but there is no doubt that he was honest in his hatred of the whites, and his breaking of the peace pipe, saying that he ‘wanted to fight and wanted to die,’ showed that he was no coward. But he represented the past. His influence was incompatible with progress, and his death marks an era in the civilization of the Sioux.”