vi

April

I walk out of the hospital and into the wash with a cup of coffee. The sun is bright, so bright that my eyes begin to tear. The sky is marked with wisps of cloud. There is shade only beneath the olive tree, its black juice smeared in the dust. I break off pieces of a creosote bush. I smell the leaves and what little rain is left in them, the purity of the plant’s smoke. I smell the leaves and remember my father crushing them in his hands, smelling and sighing, his fingers stained, telling me this is what smells so beautiful when it rains in the desert.

I preferred New York under rain. It made winter days warmer and summer days cooler. It made the spring sad and the autumn sad in the exact same way. Like its sound, it leveled seasons. The years smashed together in New York. Sometimes I cannot locate any one night as if my life in New York were but a flood of nights. An eternal room full of empty wine bottles, ashtrays overflowing, the maze of screeching trains, Laura at the window, Dylan and his parties, filled with fur and cocaine and moderate celebrity, and the cab rides home, the drunken swipes of credit cards with fifteen-dollar balances behind drivers whose faces I never remembered come morning, dinners with Laura alone, Thai food, not finishing our plates, ordering more to drink, someone at the piano, someone holding the guitar, strumming chords, singing songs, concerts in the beginning, neon flashing, rich acquaintances in Soho lofts, next stop Williamsburg, living in the dark, living in the night, making it through the day only to afford the night. The new trains arrived from nowhere, their sound on the tracks so clean compared to the old, their automated voices, their fluorescent lights, their machines that told us where we were going but not from where we had come as stops, once passed, disappeared from the monitors. How Dylan’s place suddenly had a name outside its owner, and therefore was no longer ours but everyone’s, less a home than a social event: 979 after its address, 97 Ninth Street.

And then a night comes forward, a night memory won’t allow me to forget—the night on which Laura, outraged by her progressive madness, walked slowly down the steps from our home and in her arms, holding a chandelier, a sculpture, as Dylan came to call them, and like an offering walked to the canal, and though we both shouted, Dylan and I, “What the fuck are you doing?” threw it in, and as if we were all under a spell, watched it explode before hitting the putrid water, shatter in blue light. And watching those pieces shatter perfectly, my knee began to hurt like a phantom limb, a phantom wound, for no reason at all. I was no dancer. I was nobody.

We had both gone, Laura and I, as far as we could go, and it was nearly to the end.

In all the years we lived together, Dylan made one meal. Laura slept through it. Burned scrambled eggs with burned bacon. The smell of the fried yolk made me retch. He hardly ate, and that morning was the same. He picked at his food, swallowing a bite every five minutes. He lit a cigarette and smoked over the food. “Do you wish I’d never met you two?”

“We thought we were special,” I said. “Meeting you.”

“Everyone wants to be special,” Dylan said curtly, piecing the fat from the meat of the bacon.

“But we’re not,” I said.

“But you are.” He handed me his cigarette and made himself a screwdriver, shaking the orange juice. “We fallen angels are always mightily tested.”

“Sounds like a good phrase for your wall,” I said.

“Indeed,” he said and began spray-painting his sudden brilliance. “You know what I wanted when I came here? I wanted to build a boat in the yard. I wanted to sail around the world. That’s all I’ve ever really wanted. To never come home to anywhere. To always be out on the water. But I never did. I got caught by New York. Lost in it.”

“We’re lost too.”

“We wait for someone to activate the darkness inside us so we can come into the light. Like moths in their cocoons. Poor devils beside butterflies. Like fucking babies squirted through the womb. Every one of us should carry warning labels like on CDs. You can’t blame me. I can’t blame you. Nature and nurture. Even the scientists know that. In the end, we make silk. We go to Montauk. We escape the privation of the clock.”

When I return, my father looks drugged. His eyes are watery. He’s lost focus. He does not notice the doctor. “You know there is an Indian tribe that believes that on Judgment Day you are held accountable for your conduct in your dreams equal to your conduct in your waking life?” he asks.

The doctor asks for my mother and me to step outside.

“I won’t listen to anything you say,” my father says. He is singing, a song without lyrics, and then over and over again a chorus he’s made up: “Moon child, moon child, moon shine, moon night.”

“His temperature has risen a bit. We want to keep him here just to make sure, you know, everything is steady,” the doctor says. “He may be having slight hallucinations.”

Laura still had a way with men. She had a way of never paying for anything. She’d had that way since we were girls when she shoplifted makeup from the mall. One night we met two tourists at a bar. One was beautiful, one was not. Laura tapped one on the shoulder as if she’d known him for years and asked, “Why are you taking so long with our drinks?”

The men looked confused, and then Laura began to laugh, and they laughed back with new desire. We squeezed into the seats beside them, repeating everything twice so they might understand us. They were German. Laura chose the most expensive martinis on the menu, then turned to me. “Dylan fucked you yet?”

“You’re crazy,” I said.

“He’s had the entire city,” she said.

I looked at her face in a way I hadn’t in years. We stop knowing the faces of those we love, those we see every day, just the way we stop knowing our own. The faces we know day in and day out become automatic, like turning on the ignition, lighting a cigarette. Despite the way she had grown thinner, her hair parched, her face worn, her eyes were still beautiful, magnanimous, unavoidable. They had grown lighter, their amber more brilliant. The rings beneath them were now grey and deep, but they broadcast such impossible innocence. Sometimes she would appear naked before me, undressing on the way to the shower, and though she had paled from our days in the desert, her body still glowed in contrast to the stark loft. Her small breasts cast perfect shadows on her skin, her funny walk, the way her ass seemed to speak, sashaying with sweet attitude so opposite to her swan neck, so elegant, regal. She was a thing so alive, always. She couldn’t not be looked at.

She got up to go to the bathroom. When she returned, a dust of white powder was crusted above her lip. “The curse is back!” she said to the men.

I licked my finger and wiped her nose.

“Don’t be a hypocrite,” she said.

We stayed with the Germans until two in the morning. In the end, while they were outside smoking, Laura stole their change from the bill they had footed for us. The bartender grabbed her wrist. I threw my half-full glass at him so he’d release her. It hit his shoulder. We ran for blocks, the bouncer chasing after us. We ran as if in a dream. The streets were dark. I slipped at one point, and Laura pulled me up, then hailed a cab.

“Let’s get high,” Laura said when we were safely inside the car. She said it as if it she were saying, Let’s swing, let’s jump on the trampoline, let’s run through the sprinklers. She said it like a child. “Wasn’t that so much fun?”

Our entire friendship was in the back of that cab we took at fifteen, the Superstition Mountains disappearing behind us, the windows rolled down, the dawn rolling up, the wind in our hair, going home together far too late in silence.

Years passed in New York. They passed quickly. There were beautiful nights running home in the rain, standing at the canal and watching it snow. There were the rare sober nights spent in movie theaters crying at foreign films. There were the nights Laura and I danced in bars alone far past four a.m. The shutters closed, a secret crew smoking and laughing and defying the morning. There were Saturdays on rooftops when someone played a song we had not heard since we were kids, and we were thrilled. The world still might be ours. There were the few parties, where perhaps we met someone who gave us the impression that they believed in us, that they would help us in some undefinable but essential way, through whiskey eyes. But Sunday always came. And with every Sunday we were sadder.

The subway was my solace. I memorized the variance in the sound of the trains. The A’s low rumble as if it had inherited the knowledge that its journey ended at the ocean. The difference between the new F and the old F even before it pulled into the station. The torturous turns the 2 made as it pulled in and out of Park Place. The tender whirr of the G. I studied the faces of other commuters. I tried to imagine their pain, their bliss. I still stayed on the train past my stop and took it to Coney Island. Sometimes I rode the Ferris wheel alone just to feel the wind, just to see the sea. I loved it in winter most when all that was open was a hot dog stand, the conductors lazily chatting in the train yard about their children, their shifts. Rubbing their arms from the freeze, wearing only their blue knit MTA sweaters. It could have been anywhere in America and in the off-season, it seemed the New York everyone had received, all glittering, claustrophobic, vertiginous, was completely elsewhere.

Everywhere we went, everyone was on drugs in a frivolous way. We believed we were too, but we were on drugs in a heavy way. It was such sordid glory, to be the one always with the number, always with the secret bag tucked in our jeans, in the foil of our cigarette packs, in our rundown lipsticks. To be the girls at 979 who knew where the stash was. There were too many people now to simply leave it out on a table. Laura and I had purpose. We were possessed with the power to ensure all the beautiful people wouldn’t leave the night without getting high.

In time, though, Laura began to lock herself in the bathroom for hours, talking to herself. She took chairs out to the lot and sat staring into the canal, missing the party entirely. And in time, I was exhausted if not high, a shell of a person. And some nights, alone in my bed, I felt that my heart might cave in at any minute. Some nights I walked home through the snow or the rain or the heat, walked until the dawn fell and saw death. I saw auras, patches of sky vacuumed through. I believed I saw the devil once. He had a bellowing face. He was beautiful. Dark complected, tiger eyed. He was far from me, across the room from me. I could not help but be drawn to him. I began to get closer. I could hear him say as a vial was placed in my hand, “And in the end, even God will have to admit that all those who wandered here wandered toward good.”

Dylan was snapping his fingers in front of my face. “Ariel, you want some or what?”

“My bones are sore,” I said.

I see the panic in my mother’s eyes. “I have to go out for a while . . . I need some air,” she says.

My father’s nurse comes to change his sheets. They are entirely wet. I long for a drink. It is not even noon. I can see that the heart rate on his monitor has elevated. His blood pressure too. I can see his soul on that monitor. I remember suddenly to pray. I do not believe the words that run through my mind as I recite silently. But I repeat them beneath my breath, over and over again.

There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed. At 979, it was eternally 5:13 in the morning. The dawn is so violent when you’ve stayed up all night. At that hour, I see the three of us at Dylan’s table or in the truck, doing lines of whatever pill or powder we could find, downing the last drip of whiskey, so high we screamed at the dawn for its innocence. Some nights in bed alone, I tried to pray. Tried to repeat the words my mother used to hush me up in my childhood bed. Shema Yisrael. But the rest of the words wouldn’t come. I hadn’t prayed since fifteen. That night long gone, sitting in the backseat of the meth car, behind the blond boy streaked blue, gazing at the desert still as midnight, believing time was not a circle but a ladder that only led upward.

One morning, I looked at the clock and saw that it was 5:13 when Laura begged me to come up on the roof with her. We waved at a train. No one seemed to notice. No one waved back. No one was looking out of the train window at that hour. They were good people. They were going to work.

That night on the roof, Laura said, “Let’s jump.” She said it over and over again, giddy. Let’s jump, jump, jump.

I thought of what my parents would be doing at that very moment, asleep together at the end of a long night, my father closing the garage as the blue dawn rose over the desert. His taxi safely inside. Everything slowly gaining color and definition with the song of the birds. “Come on, Laura. Let’s go down.”

“Maybe if we jump,” she said, “we won’t fall, we’ll just keep going. Didn’t you ever play that game as a kid? The Peter Pan game, where you’d fly off some steps and see how long it’d take you to land?”

“Danielle is not Laura,” I said. She threw her cigarette toward the tracks, then took both of my hands and began to whirl me around and around and around.

“What does it feel like to have a mother?” she said as we spun.

“I have to stop,” I said. Laura sat down cross-legged and pulled at her hair, waiting for an answer. “To have a mother feels like somehow you are safe.”

“Safe,” she repeated. “Maybe that’s why I’m so unsafe.”

“It’s five fifteen,” I said.

“So?” she said. “Since when do you care what time it is?”

At last I went home. While I was there, my father stayed out wandering in his taxi every night. I’d hear the garage door at three in the morning, his slow shuffle through the door, the clink of ice in a glass.

While he was out in the night still in pursuit of his alien ship, my mother and I would share two bottles of wine and sit before the television. She’d fall asleep halfway through the first movie. I’d shake her awake around midnight, bring her to bed just the way I always did. “How’d you finish all that wine?” she’d say.

Finally my father broke his silence. “Let’s go take a walk, Ahlam. Let’s go to the reservation.” As we walked, he would take a step and wince. We rested every hundred meters. “I just need to go in for another procedure. Just one more this time,” he said.

An hour later, we were in the car. I was driving him to the hospital.

“Just down Mountainview, like the way we used to go.”

“I know the way, Dad.”

“I just need them to give me morphine. It’s the only thing that makes the pain go away,” he said.

On the drive home, dazed and dreamy, my father spoke. “The one they nearly left in the road out of Palestine . . . that was me. I am Yusef. I am the curse. She nearly left me, my own mother. I brought this tragedy.” From his pocket he produced a fifth of vodka.

“Dad, you can’t drink with that medicine,” I said.

“We are all cursed. We live in the era of the curse. A world that cannot be fixed. The best thing would be an alien ship. Another planet. One with three moons. But you, I saw you in my dreams. I saw you coming. You came to heal my broken heart. That’s why I named you Ahlam.”

I lit a cigarette. “Go ahead, take a smoke,” my father said. “It won’t kill you. Only sadness will.”

For those I come from, there is nothing more devouring than the feeling of want for home, the feeling of need for home. We are all waiting for a form of transport, a ship, a saucer to carry us out of the too-dark night. For my father’s family this was called Palestine, for my mother’s, it was “next year in Jerusalem.” One branch of my blood comprised of wandering in the desert for forty years at my birth; the other of wandering for two thousand, only to find themselves home in a land continually threatened by war. For those who were here before us it was all the names, all the names slowly being erased, names long since renamed, long since buried.

I inherited this longing. I was addicted to it. And so I was at home with those who wanted and never had enough. I was at home in the places that could never be. The places found only in dreams.

When I returned to New York, it had already changed. I always wished things could just remain. There was a new café on our block between the loft and the train. There were two girls sitting on a patio table at its front. There was a luxury furniture store opening in a month. The Kentile Floors sign was to be taken down. Every day there were new faces arriving in the city, drugged with dreams. Nothing would stop New York. The watermelon men looked on, tilted their hats with less and less passion, suspecting soon, perhaps, they would be disappeared from their own block. I loved the secret spaces in New York, the vacant spaces. The abandoned buildings of Fort Tilden, sand filling the floors, the abandoned homes in the Navy Yard, their windows broken through by tree branches, the outdoor shuttle train in Crown Heights, moving through the snow and the leaves and the forgotten cigarettes, moving on beside the park suddenly as if through the woods. I loved the abandoned subway stations, rushing past the darkened platforms, the sprawl of graffiti like old letters. Letters left by ghosts.

I was still a secretary. There were new horrors to fear. Every day a dog and a cop passed me in the station. We always saw something, but we never said anything. There were new bombs and new famines and new viruses.

One afternoon, I followed a young dancer out of the train at Lincoln Center, her tresses wrapped up in a perfect bun. Her smell soaked the car, her smell of hairspray, of chalk, of lipstick, of hope. I had no business being there, but I followed her until she disappeared through the glass doors. “Hey,” I called after her. She never turned around.

When I got home, Laura was on the bed with a man I’d never seen before. The stranger’s hair was white, but his face was young, handsome. There was foil on the table with powder in it. Beside it were two syringes. I never learned his name. “It’s pure as shit,” Laura said.

I had brought my music box ballerina from Arizona, the one I had had as a child. She was blonde, slender and tall. She danced to “Für Elise” forever, as long as you wound her up. She could have spun and spun just like I was spinning and spinning out of orbit except that I could blame no one for it, not even Laura. And so that night, coming down hard and sad and nauseous, my heart beating too fast, I thought it made sense to let my ballerina go. I spun her up and dropped her in that poisoned canal, Beethoven fading as the wind took her slowly away from me.

I return from retrieving my mother when I see two officers rushing down the hall toward my father’s room. Their guns bang against their legs, and for a moment I fantasize slipping one out from their holsters, taking hostage of the entire hospital, letting my father go free. There is shouting and commotion, and my nails are pressed into my palms, drawing blood.

My mother looks at me, and we both begin to run after the guards. She falls behind me, whimpering. My father’s room is empty, the sheets hanging from the bed, the IVs tethered to nothing.

At the last party I remember, Laura stripped to her bra and underwear, climbed atop the stove, grabbed Dylan’s hair, spit on Dylan’s face, told Dylan to light her on fire if he wanted to get rid of her. He picked her up and moved her outside like a bag of trash to deposit outdoors while she struggled, kicking against him. He mouthed crazy to the guests, making a circular motion at his temple with his fingers to signify such dispensable madness. I went out after them.

He brushed by me on the way back, nearly knocking me over. “I’m not dealing with this.” Laura was perched beside the canal, holding her knees, making herself as small as she could. She was smoking, speaking beneath her breath to herself. There was blood caked on her upper lip. She turned to me.

“Is there a lot of it?” she said.

“Laura,” I said. “You’re shaking.”

“Just like that night at that party where I fucked Dylan the first time, and you . . . when I turned over in bed . . .” She wiped the blood off her face with her palm. “I asked you if there was a lot of it.”

“I remember,” I said.

“I’m sorry I never really asked you about that night,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t save you. Without you . . .” She paused. “How many years have we been here? Time seems to go so fast now.”

“You couldn’t have saved me.”

“I could have,” she said. “Remember how dangerous I used to be?” She walked away from me and climbed over the small wall that separated the lot from the canal. She crouched and urinated into the water.

“You’ll never give up on me, right?” She took out a vial and put it to her nose. Her hands were shaking, and she dropped it. The glass and the cocaine fell on the rocks, indistinguishable from the grime of the canal. She leaned down.

“Please don’t do that,” I said. “Please, Laura.” She continued snorting whatever she could find, white or not white, manic for it all.

I walked away from her and wandered back into the party. I drank quickly so as to pass out quicker. The party was full of strangers. They were all mockeries. The party was a stream of faces, fractured sentences on labels, tours, galleries, film festivals, acquisitions, engagements, Dylan navigating through it, his face masked with coke, booze, that demonic New York confidence. He was on the couch smoking with a beautiful girl, another one whose name I’d never know, never remember. I fought the urge to throw something at her, innocent as she was. Her dark and flowering hair, her husky, flowering voice.

Laura began to speak of Jesus suddenly. She spoke of angels. She said her angels had come to forgive her sins. Her skin sagged over her bones. She’d lost her breasts. Some mornings I’d find her in the kitchen, her lips blue. Some mornings her face became so white I thought she’d die right before me. Laura heard voices. She switched languages midsentence.

One morning, I found Laura still awake, pacing the length of the apartment, holding Ofelia in her cage, swinging it back and forth like a pendulum.

“Laura, what’s going on?” She kept pacing in a daze, as if I were not there at all. “Laura!” I shouted. Finally I ran toward her. She dropped the cage like she’d seen a ghost. The bird clattered about between the bars, terrified.

“What?” she said.

“I called your name three times. You were in a trance.”

“Would you leave me alone? You’re the cursed one here. All those guys you fucked, dead. Then we get here and what happens?” She kicked the cage again. “Do you hear me? I want you to leave me the fuck alone.”

Dylan left us soon after the night Laura broke his chandelier in the canal. She tiptoed out from the lot with no shoes on, dancing around her own spill of glass. Neither of us ran after her. All else could be tolerated or ignored by Dylan, the voices, the agony, the madness, the drug abuse, but not the destruction of his work. He pulled out a bottle of whiskey. “That’s fifty thousand dollars she just destroyed,” he said. “The bitch is out. The bitch better not ever come back. And after all I did for her.”

Dylan and I began to drink. We finished the bottle and then walked to a bar. One of the new bars in the neighborhood. There was a line outside.

“Where the fuck did all these people come from?” he said. “This shit is all bridge and tunnel now. Fuck this fucking city. We’re going to members only.”

At the bar, Dylan took his hand and placed it in mine. I shifted and let his hand fall. “We’re losing her,” I said.

I wanted him to touch me again. I felt nauseous for wanting it. The sax and the piano and a DJ were going all at once. We were screaming at each other. He went to the other side of the bar. The room was full of people. Crimson lit. Joyous people. No one needed our names.

I began to dance. I hadn’t danced in years. Dylan had never seen me dance. Dylan watched me. His eyes haunted me. They were eyes that you saw later. Eyes that made you feel like you were on camera. Eyes of ambition. He was addictive. He was insolent. He was searing. Laura was right. Dylan was New York.

I was falling in the streets home. My scarf dragged, tripping me. Dylan was holding my wrist hard and fast, pulling me on. Where the canal was, I saw a dark forest. Where the coyotes once were, I saw Cerberus.

When we returned home, Laura was waiting for us. She was lying on the floor in the same position I’d found her in a year or so previous, splayed out on the floor beneath Dylan’s chandelier, looking at the ceiling as if at stars.

“Hello,” she said calmly.

Dylan took a glass that was on the counter and smashed it in his hand. “You bitch,” he screamed. His palm began to bleed.

“I’ll make it up to you,” she said.

“How will you make it up to me? I want you out of here.”

“Come here, Ariel. Come get naked and lie beside me,” she said.

“I’m tired, Laura,” I said.

“Come help me get my boyfriend back,” she said. “The two of us can make it up to you Dylan. We can give you a five-thousand-dollar experience. After all, my best friend is the world’s greatest blow job girl.”

“Leave me alone,” I said.

“Please,” she said. “Please, please, please. You know you want to. You’ve always wanted this. I know. I can see inside your dreams.”

In the morning, Dylan was gone. My skirt was hitched above my belly. My underwear was on the floor. Nothing ripped. The glass had been swept up. The blood from his hand was dried on my breast. There was nothing left of the night for me to stuff into a bag. On my inner thigh, there was a wound. His parting mark, a burn from a cigarette. It was blue and purple and more hideous than any of the three I had done on my own arm all those years ago.

Laura was in the bed watching me as I woke, staring hard and dark with a love or a hate so ferocious I yearned to flee her gaze, that ancient, unavoidable gaze. Laura pushed the blanket down to reveal her naked body, lifting her leg to show me her wound. “Blood sisters,” she said.

I take off for the doors, leaving my mother with the doctors and the nurses and the guards. I run toward the reservation. I trip over a dead saguaro and for a minute think it a body. In death, the saguaro’s needles abandon it. Its carcass resembles a skeleton. Walking upon one in the desert, it is always at first the mirage of a body left to rot beneath the sun. I remember thinking it would make for such a pretty structure for a chandelier, the saguaro’s corpse, but of course it would burn. In death, its water abandons it. It cannot hold the rain.

I don’t see my father but hear what I believe is a coyote, a raccoon, rustling just ahead. His low mutter in Arabic reveals him. He is walking rapidly, ducking behind saguaros, his hospital gown coming undone, a sheet of white fluttering in the bare brownness of everything. I scream his name. “Dad, Dad, Dad.”

“My ship is waiting,” he says. “There’s no time left.”

“You are walking in the middle of the fucking desert!” I say. “There is no ship.”

The morning Dylan left, the room billowing white, I looked out and saw that it was snowing. He was gone. No wallet, no forgotten sock. A note on the wall that read, You have until October. Off to Berlin, D. Like he appeared to us with the Lights, he disappeared, without trace or origin. He was the type of man who reinvents his life once every few years, who rids himself entirely and unapologetically of unwinning elements so that he could go on toward his nebulous goal, amass more broken instruments, more parties, more strangers, more collectors, more buried, broken Lauras. This too was his power. He could disappear from the lives of others at any instant without consequence.

I went out in the snow. I held some in my hand. “I’m so sorry,” I said beneath my breath over and over again to no one. To myself. It was so pure, the snow, the purest of all powders, I thought, so pure it must be from elsewhere, from another planet.

Laura walked up behind me as if my sorries conjured her to me. “He’s gone,” she whispered as if there were someone else who might hear her. Someone else who cared. I left her there and went inside.

“Do you hate me?” she screamed.

I have always had recurring dreams about the apocalypse by water. But in one, it is the sun that has fallen and engulfed the sky. “But we are so far from this,” I say to the faceless many around me. “The sun won’t even begin to die for millions of years.”

“It is flaring,” they say, “before its time.”

“We were wrong,” they say. “We miscalculated. It is turning into a red giant. Soon it will be a supernova. We are nearing the end.”

Flakes of the star fall like snow in July. Flakes of the sun fall like fireflies. People are opening their mouths and gulping down the sunflakes like rain. “Tastes like rye,” one says.

“No, tastes likes blow,” another says.

I swallow a flake. “It tastes like God,” I say.

My father had called while I was out in the snow. How he had always sensed when I had fallen into trouble, I never knew. As when he demanded we go to the mountains just to see snow the day after the night with the blue-streaked blond. How he knew just what to say, what prayer to read, how to quiet my fears. We both suffered the same nightmares. We both woke up on the same nights with charley horses rattling our calves. We both knew no bounds to our escapism.

“How are you, my daughter?” he asked.

“The snow just stopped,” I said.

“Ahlam, one day you look in the mirror and you see your parents’ sadness in your eyes. In New York I liked to watch the snow. It is not fair, how quiet it is, the snow, it is not fair. It is not fair the snow does not fall in the desert. It would make so much sense.” I heard the cat’s whine, the door slam, the car engine, the garage. “My birthday is coming.”

“I want to come home,” I said.

The day before I left, Laura and I finally turned the space heaters off. Since Dylan had left, we ate in silence. I went to work, and when I returned, she was still in the tent in the truck, often drunk or asleep. We were an even older, an even more weary couple. Neither of us uttered his name.

For the first time in months, the sun reflected off the canal, beamed into the loft, and woke us up with it. It was suddenly spring. Laura came inside from the truck and demanded we go to the beach. “It’s still too cold,” I said. She began jumping up and down on the bed. She was even thinner than before, her cheekbones popped out from her skin. I hadn’t looked at her in so long. I had become afraid of looking at her at all. I could not accept that I was watching her die.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

In her purse, she carried a 750-ml bottle of Yellowtail, a medicine bottle of Oxys she pilfered off a dentist, and tucked between the cash in her wallet, a bag of blow. We took the A train out to its last stop, as we’d done in the beginning and hadn’t in years. The beach was still closed. No lifeguards, no police. There were no children. We stayed throughout the day. We drank the wine. We spoke of TP-ing houses at fourteen. We spoke of home. The wind off the water was cold. A fog rolled in. I napped intermittently.

“Take a bump?” she asked, smiling at me. I took a bump from her fist. My brain came alight with tenderness for her. I felt so sorry for everything. I yearned to embrace her, kiss her even, to stay with her, always her, my sister, my friend to the end. It was a story after all, even if a sick one. It was completely ours. She stood up and stripped. “Come in with me,” she said.

I shook her off.

“Come in with me,” she said again, yanking my arm.

“It’s going to freeze us,” I said.

Laura stuck out her tongue. Somehow, despite everything, she was still a child. Her face implored me, confused, excitable. She was still the girl running through the desert but on a more polluted course.

“Do you love me?” she asked. And then she dove into the waves. The dusk was complete above us.

I watched her and began to laugh nervously as she swam farther and farther out, the fog half disappearing her. “Aren’t you freezing?” I shouted. Suddenly her body wasn’t visible, and all I could see was her head ducking in and out of the waves. “Laura!” I screamed.

I entered the ocean, the tide pushing hard against me. My limbs went numb. The cold shot through my blood and my bones. The voices pounded in my temples. Come come come come come. They screamed louder and then whispered. I was sinking. Arms came up from the waves. There were bodies beneath me. I had stepped on them, on their chests and their bellies in an effort to enter the water. I knew their faces. Trevor, the blond streaked blue, Eli. And then more, too many, thousands. The water was all limbs. In the mist, the sky fell into the sea. I was burning inside. I shut my eyes. My chest was on fire. The pain would not last. The pain would not last.

I fought my way back to the beach and screamed for help. My knee began to ache like it hadn’t ever. There was nobody, nothing. Suddenly I saw Laura’s body rise up. She was standing, her waist above the water. I was hallucinating. She was surely dead.

“A sandbar!” she said, shivering when she came up from the water.

“Laura, you’re so cold you’re blue.”

She wrapped herself in the blanket we had lain on and lit a cigarette. Mascara ran down her face. The constellation on her chest was purple in the cold. I began to cry. She began to hum. “What the fuck are you singing?” I asked.

“You know the song, Sleeping Beauty.” Laura scooped up the sand and let it fall through her fingers, surveying the grains as if comprised of distinct, tiny worlds.

“Stop it,” I said. “This isn’t funny.”

She crooned on until her cigarette was gone. The ash in the wind blew around us like hesitant snow. “I want to set you free about something, Ariel. But you have to promise you’ll forgive me first.”

“Just don’t drown yourself again.”

“I’m a Jonah.”

The ocean had ripped the high from me. I felt nothing but panic, fear. I wanted nothing more than to deaden the static going and going in my mind. “What the fuck is a Jonah?”

“Someone who makes every ship sink wherever they go. Someone who brings bad weather. Someone who is cursed.” Laura was picking at her fingernails. “There is something else too. Eli, Señor Guapo, he had really nice-smelling sweat.”

I looked at her, perplexed.

“So it’s not a big deal you were fucking Dylan. I know it wasn’t just the once. Because I screwed Eli in his jeep. A day after you did. You told me it was only math homework, remember? And you thought you were cursed. But it’s been me all along.”

I left her on the beach, her humming reaching me faintly over the waves, the song she sang at the football game all those years ago beneath the fireworks, the one I couldn’t place, the one she always sang, far back as it was in my childhood, “Once Upon a Dream.” I wanted to walk faster, to run, far as possible from her, from my entire life, from the first day I ever saw her always just a few steps ahead.

I can hear them coming, their footsteps rushing toward us. I hear a dog bark, my mother screaming at the doctors, the officers calling my name. I take my father’s hand. “I’m coming with you.”

“It’s just there. Do you see it?” Tears run down his cheeks. His hands are cold with sweat.

“I see it,” I say. I walk him in a circle. I walk him back toward the fluorescence, the windowless halls of disinfectant, the heart monitors, sheets and beds and sheets. He stops.

“It’s just there,” he says again. Something shimmers in the distance. A veil of water. A mirage.

In the morning Laura was by the window with Ofelia. She was smoking a cigarette, looking out as the trains passed. “I was just being crazy. I didn’t mean any of that. I was having a little schizo moment, you know. Eli, Guapo, whatever. That didn’t happen. But I did mean it about the Jonah thing . . .”

“Maybe the worst part is that it has nothing to do with us,” I said. I put my arm around her mildly. “Maybe I’m a Jonah too.”

“I’m with you,” she said. “You thought you were following me, but I was following you too. Always. Always.”

As I walked out of the door, she called after me. “Ariel . . . we live in a world of crippled hearts. But we shall still love. Remember the rain will always follow you. And to listen for the trumpet.”

I did not turn around. When I boarded the train, I saw the sight of our little home beside the canal, the canal carved through the abandon like a crucifix.

It was my father’s birthday. He wanted to have a picnic by the lake. It was the only body of water for miles. It was man-made and nestled between the mountains. The water was brownish and full of mud. There were no fish, and signs everywhere warned against swimming. But the sight of any blue against the desert rock brought relief.

My father already had trouble standing, and so my mother and I took either side of him as he limped toward the beach. He tossed his head up and down, soaking his hair. “You must touch your head to the water, Ahlam. You must submerge it every time. Remember this when you go to the ocean,” he said. “This is how you rid yourself of the evil eye. The salt gets in your hair to your shoulders.”

“But there isn’t any salt in this water,” I said.

“Just pretend,” he said.

After his ritual, we ate egg-and-tomato sandwiches under the sun. “Why don’t we take a trip to see the real ocean?” my mother asked.

“With what money?” my father said. “It’s my birthday, and I am very happy being here at the lake with these delicious sandwiches.”

Night had fallen on the drive home from the lake. “We are from somewhere else,” my father said.

“We used to be from somewhere else. Now we are from here. This hellhole,” my mother said.

“You and I, your mother, Ahlam, we are from up there,” my father continued. “We come from the stunning stars. We were just born in the wrong place. We were meant to live on another planet. The people who come to the desert are those who know this, deep inside of them, we are from up there. From far, far away.”

“No one knows how to listen in this family,” my mother said. “Don’t learn that from your father. Ariel, why aren’t you saying anything? You’ve spoken three words this entire trip.”

“Do you really believe in curses?” I said.

“Of course I do. I was born inside a curse,” my father said. “Don’t you know the story of the Bedouins in the desert who used to dig and dig for water? All they wanted to find in the dirt was water. All they needed was water, but sometimes they found a black liquid instead. And they knew if it was black, not blue, that God had cursed them. That they were being punished. They would wail and scream and plead to not find it ever again. Every time they saw black instead of blue. Well, suddenly the West needed that black liquid. And some of those Bedouins became rich from the very same thing they used to believe was a curse. But oil is still a curse. Would there be war at all if it weren’t for oil? How many millions have died for that black liquid curse?”

Sitting in the backseat, gazing out at the few stars in the dark, I thought of all of the nights in New York I’d come close to death, all the nights I pushed it too hard, of the booze and drugs I had consumed to escape my losses, realizing that if I had succeeded, my ghost would yearn to return to the one place I’d tried to flee, the desert, being driven by my parents, fighting in the front seats, being driven through the dark toward home.

I awoke in the middle of the night in my childhood bed, and there were tears on my pillow. I had been crying in my sleep. I had been dreaming of my mother at the Sea of Galilee. Rather than one large semicircular lake, it spread out like a true ocean, with bounded bays and smaller tributaries sprawling up into the land. We dove into one such islet of water, its water grey but clear. Once submerged, we saw that there were women, naked, floating beneath its surface, their hair perfectly intact, women dead since Jesus came.

Laura was there. Her hair was purple. I was consumed with love for her. Her scar was gone, her chest smooth and blank. I swam toward her, but my mother urged me up toward the surface. We had to find my father, she said. We swam and swam and then once again had to go below the surface because dusk had descended and the bombings had begun, so we stayed beneath with the other women, but I could no longer find Laura.

“We need soap,” my mother said.

My mother walks toward us. The guards remain on the sidewalk, ready for us. This day has already happened; this day will not end. My father is muttering beneath his breath.

“Tell me the story I told you when you were a child, Ahlam. The Sufi one about the butterflies . . . I forget how it goes. Tell me while we wait.”

“Yusef,” my mother says.

“You joined us,” he says.

“There are three butterflies that dance around a flame. The first butterfly comes close to the flame and says, ‘I know all about love. It is beautiful, unforgettable.’ The second butterfly wants to get even closer than the first, so it does. But it singes its wings. So it withdraws. Terrified, the butterfly says, ‘I know that love only burns.’ But the third butterfly doesn’t say anything at all. The third butterfly simply throws itself into the flames and is consumed.”

The rain has arrived. My mother and I hold my father’s hands. I take the leaves of the creosote and put them to my father’s nostrils. “Now that’s the smell of heaven,” he says.

Somewhere a television is on. Somewhere there is talk of the beheadings, of the air strikes, of the new epidemics replacing the old, of another massacre. The earth spins further from help. Beyond us the heart monitors go on, the fluorescent lights buzz, the commentators shout, the casino leaves fall into the desert, sirens blare. But all we hear is the rain.

I returned to New York at dawn on a red-eye. I longed for Laura. I had to tell her we would survive. That I forgave her everything. We would survive even ourselves, as long as we were together.

I took a right into our lot. The moon was full over the canal. I galloped through the alley and past the boulder. The sky was blue and satiny, and the city just beyond was softened in it. New York was always so beautiful in the very crux of parting with it. It was finally spring, and the winter that year seemed to never end.

There was music wafting out from the loft, classical music. I thought Laura was playing. I turned the key. Ofelia was squawking loudly, batting against her cage. I saw Laura. The sheath of the piano was open as if just used. A song was on the record player. “Kol Nidre.”

“Laura,” I said. I walked to the window. I sat on the bed beside her. She was wearing a charcoal-grey dress. Her mascara had dried on her cheeks. There was residue of powder on a book. An empty bottle of wine. The Oxys emptied. A syringe on the floor. “Laura,” I whispered. I lay down beside her. The train lights moved above us, refracting off the window. Through my sudden tears, the train lights smeared like shooting stars. Lying before the rippling blue window, below the slurred lights of the world above, it was as if we were underwater. “Laura, you’re cold,” I said.